Empowering customer innovation together with VMware

VMware Explore 2026 is here, and we are absolutely thrilled to connect with you! The partnership between NetApp and VMware is built on many years of joint innovation, and we have consistently worked together to create solutions that help you navigate the complexities of modern IT.

Our announcements from 2025 centered on delivering enterprise-class storage and data management for virtualized environments, and we are continuing to build on that momentum today. Our shared focus is always on enabling your success and driving customer innovation. Events like VMware Explore are so valuable because they allow us to talk directly with you. We truly love interacting with our customers and partners, hearing about your major challenges, and finding ways to overcome them together.

Elevating VMware Cloud Foundation, VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service, and multi-cloud support

We have some exciting updates to share on how we help customers consistently and securely support their VMware environments. A major highlight is our enhanced support for VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1. Leveraging NetApp ONTAP as external storage gives you greater choice while gaining robust data management features for your business. For organizations adopting VCF 9.1, our joint engineering delivers cost-effective data management and strong cyber resilience. New capabilities like NetApp Console Backup and Recovery alongside Console Data Services help safeguard your data against threats with near-zero recovery times. We are also bringing advanced datastore granular replication and consistency group management right into the vCenter interface to simplify daily operations for VCF administrators.

As containerization becomes a standard practice for modernizing applications, we want to ensure your infrastructure can keep up without adding unnecessary complexity. NetApp paired with VMware vSphere Kubernetes Service allows you to manage containerized applications right alongside your virtual machines using the VMware tools you already know. Powering this service is NetApp Trident, our foundational Container Storage Interface, which we have combined with Trident Protect on VKS.

This powerful integration with our ONTAP data management platform delivers the enterprise features your production workloads demand. You gain application-aware backup and replication capabilities, ensuring your critical containerized applications are always protected and available. This simplifies your architecture and reduces operational costs, allowing your business to focus on building valuable software rather than managing disparate environments.

We believe in making powerful data management simple. That is why we are excited about new capabilities in ONTAP tools for VMware. We put advanced storage controls directly into the vCenter UI, the environment VMware administrators live in every day. This integration means that VMware admins can now manage sophisticated data replication and ensure consistency across their datastores without needing to file a ticket or wait for the storage team. By having native control over their vSphere Metro Storage Clusters from the interface they already know, they can work more independently from storage teams, streamline their workflows, and manage their data with greater speed and agility.

Beyond the details in our press release, we’re thrilled to share further enhancements across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Our dedication to providing a simple, consistent, and secure hybrid cloud experience for your VMware workloads continues.

Expanded disaster recovery options

NetApp recently acquired JetStream Software to further strengthen our data protection capabilities in the cloud. This technology offers continuous data protection for mission-critical applications running in Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. More importantly, it is storage agnostic, delivering value for any on-premises storage. When data gets recovered it can be directed into hyperscalers who have strategic relationships with NetApp. JetStream delivers rapid recovery along with reduced infrastructure costs. It highlights our strategy to help protect your data regardless of the underlying storage vendor you currently use.

Double density and lower costs with AWS

If you are building your environment on Amazon Elastic VMware Service (EVS), pairing it with Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSxN) maximizes your cost savings and performance. Unlike traditional vSAN architectures that consume valuable local host NVMe SSDs to manage the shared storage layer, FSxN decouples storage from compute and lets you dedicate 100% of those NVMe devices to EVS's new Memory Tiering feature. By offloading cold data to local NVMe and reserving DRAM for active pages, you can double your VM density. Combined with ONTAP's industry-leading storage efficiencies, you can deploy a 2-host minimum environment instead of the usual 3, reducing host requirements and your TCO by up to 40%.

Enhancing Azure VMware Solution and data protection

For customers using Azure VMware Solution, Microsoft is continuously enhancing Azure NetApp Files, their cloud storage service built on NetApp technology. Recently, Microsoft introduced n-connect, which improves performance significantly by establishing multiple network sessions to a single volume. Instead of sending all Azure VMware Solution datastore traffic through one stream, the client distributes it across several parallel connections, driving more traffic at a lower overall latency. This feature is ideal for demanding workloads and helps you get excellent value from your cloud investment.

Enabling data mobility and migration with Google Cloud

Google Cloud NetApp Volumes (GCNV) is a fully managed storage service from Google Cloud built on NetApp ONTAP software. GCNV offers enterprise grade data management with Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) environments. With VMware certification for GCNV Flex Unified service levels for NFS and VMFS external datastores, GCVE supports GCNV across all service availability regions. Customers can now use external NFS and VMFS datastores to optimize their resource utilization and cost by independently scaling compute and capacity. Using an external datastore also enables seamless migration from hybrid cloud VMware deployments and Disaster Recovery use cases to Google Cloud.

These announcements and enhancements reflect our ongoing dedication to helping you build an intelligent data infrastructure that spans on-premises and cloud VMware environments.