---
title: "Scale Storage Independently: Google Cloud NetApp Volumes for GCVE"
date: "2025-11-15T00:00:00Z"
tags: ["NetApp", "NFS", "vSAN"]
categories: ["Google Cloud", "Storage"]
---


One of the historical pain points of hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) like vSAN is that if you need more storage, you often have to buy more compute nodes. Not anymore.

GCVE now supports **External NFS Datastores** using **Google Cloud NetApp Volumes** or **Filestore**. This allows you to scale storage capacity from Terabytes to Petabytes without adding a single extra ESXi host.

## How to configure it

1.  **Provision:** Create a NetApp Volume in the same region as your Private Cloud.
2.  **Network:** Ensure your Private Connection is configured (VPC Peering).
3.  **Mount:** In the GCVE portal, go to Storage > External Datastores and mount the volume. It appears in vCenter just like any other NFS store.

![Mounting NFS Datastore in GCVE Portal][1]

## Use Cases

* **Backup Repositories:** Cheap, deep storage.
* **File Shares:** ISO libraries or content libraries.
* **Data Lakes:** Massive datasets that don't require the ultra-low latency of local NVMe vSAN.

## Summary

This feature saves money. Period. Stop buying expensive compute nodes just to store backups!

[1]: /images/uploads/2025/11/gcve-nfs-mount.webp

[100]: https://cloud.google.com/vmware-engine 'Google Cloud VMware Engine Features'