Google Cloud VMware Engine support for GCNV Flex Unified

September 03, 2026

Google Cloud NetApp Volumes Flex Unified is now a certified enterprise storage for Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) datastores. With unified storage in Google Cloud offering support for NFS, iSCSI, and NVMe/TCP protocols, customers can run their VMware workloads on Google Cloud using enterprise-grade file and block storage with independent scaling of storage and compute. Customers can present NetApp Volumes as extensible datastores to their Google Cloud VMware Engine and z3 baremetal ESXi deployments. Support for z3 baremetal ESXi deployments is currently available in Preview.

NetApp Volumes addresses the most common challenge in right sizing a Google Cloud VMware Engine deployment when it comes to balancing the nodes for compute and capacity. GCVE allows customers to scale storage capacity, but it often comes at the cost of subscribing to compute resources when not needed; thereby leading to inefficient spend, overallocation and under-utilization of resources. With this certification of NetApp Volumes with Google Cloud VMware Engine, customers can right-size their storage footprint to host their virtual infrastructure without having to over-subscribe their compute infra to meet their high performance storage requirements. NetApp Volumes delivers scalable storage which can be presented as datastores for Google Cloud VMware Engine environments with on-demand capacity, performance and rich data management features powered by NetApp ONTAP to meet workload needs.

Whether you are migrating VMware environments to Google Cloud, expanding existing Google Cloud VMware Engine deployments, or optimizing for cost and performance, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes provides a consistent storage experience across NFS datastores and block-based workloads. Customers can choose the right protocol for each use case: NFS v3 for file-based datastores, iSCSI for block storage, and NVMe/TCP for high-throughput, low-latency workloads. Common use cases include disaster recovery environments, high-capacity workloads, datastore expansion for migrations, and supplemental storage capacity without requiring additional VMware Engine nodes while leveraging NetApp’s proven data management capabilities.

Google Cloud NetApp Volumes for Google Cloud VMware Engine datastores is now generally available across all Google Cloud regions where Google Cloud VMware Engine is available.

Additional details on NetApp Volumes can also be found in the product documentation.