Everpure Cloud Azure Native: Technical Overview and AVS Integration

Enterprises are moving more VMware workloads into Azure than ever before. When it comes to storage, teams want the elasticity and scale of the cloud without giving up the enterprise‑grade data services and operational model they rely on in their data centers.

Everpure™ Cloud Azure Native is designed to bridge that gap. It brings a Purity‑based, enterprise block storage experience directly into Azure as a fully managed, Azure Native integration, with deep integration into Azure VMware Solution (AVS). 

In this blog, we’ll look at what the service is, the challenges it addresses, who it’s built for, and how it works. Then we’ll zoom in on AVS as the premier use case, walk through how easy it is to deploy and connect, and close with the latest developments.

What is Everpure Cloud Azure Native?

As a refresher, Everpure Cloud Azure Native is a jointly developed service from Everpure and Microsoft that provides block storage as a service inside Azure. Under the covers, it runs the same Purity operating system that powers FlashArray™ and FlashBlade^®, but it’s surfaced through Azure Native Integrations, so you deploy and manage it directly in the Azure portal like any other Azure service.

At its core, the service delivers enterprise‑grade cloud block storage with automated capacity scaling, thin provisioning, and data reduction. Capacity grows as your data grows, and billing is based on effective consumed capacity rather than pre‑allocated size. There’s a minimum metered footprint of 30TiB per storage pool, which is the primary storage construct you create for the service. Volumes can be shared across multiple hosts where needed and resized dynamically without disruption, which is particularly useful for fluctuating or rapidly growing applications.

All of this is delivered as a fully managed service. There are no controllers or virtual appliances for you to deploy or maintain, and there’s no separate storage lifecycle to manage. Patching, upgrades, and service health are handled by the platform so you can focus on higher-value tasks instead of day-to-day maintenance.

The challenge

Moving VMware estates into Azure is rarely just a matter of picking a node type and migrating VMs. When AVS clusters rely solely on local storage, compute and storage scale together. If a workload needs more capacity, you may be forced to add additional, expensive ESXi hosts, even when you do not need the extra CPU or memory. That tight coupling often leads to overprovisioned clusters and cloud bills that grow faster than expected, especially for data-heavy databases.

Everpure Cloud Azure Native is designed to address these pain points. It decouples storage and compute so that you can scale storage pool capacity and performance independently from AVS cluster size and avoid buying ESXi nodes solely for disk. It applies Purity data reduction and thin provisioning in the cloud so that you pay based on effective used capacity rather than on raw allocation.

The net effect is an Azure storage layer that behaves like your enterprise arrays, but is delivered and consumed with cloud-native simplicity.

Who is it built for?

Everpure Cloud Azure Native is built for organizations that already operate VMware at scale and are now moving those estates into Azure. That includes customers standardizing on Azure VMware Solution as their primary landing zone for VMware in the cloud, as well as those planning hybrid designs where some workloads stay on premises while others move into AVS. Some customers may even see AVS as a stepping stone to Azure Native VMs.

In most environments, the primary stakeholders are cloud platform teams, VMware and infrastructure architects, and IT leaders responsible for both on‑premises platforms and cloud strategy. These teams are looking for enterprise‑grade block storage characteristics, such as predictable performance, advanced data services, data reduction, and strong security, typically in an Azure‑native form. They also want storage consumption to align with broader Azure commercial frameworks such as Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC), rather than building a separate procurement path just for storage.

How it works

From an Azure perspective, Everpure Cloud Azure Native is composed of a set of resource types that map closely to how you already think about infrastructure in the Azure portal.

Everpure Cloud Azure Native is the top‑level service object. Creating it enables the service in a region and subscription, and it becomes the anchor point for billing and management of everything that follows. Once this resource exists, you can create one or more storage pools under it.

Figure 1: Everpure Cloud Azure Native for AVS architecture.

A storage pool is the primary storage construct in the service as it represents one instance of storage performance and capacity. Performance is decoupled from capacity, so you can start at a lowest throughput setting (800MB/s) and later grow up to the 2,048MB/s maximum, independently of the used capacity. The performance you assign is shared across all volumes and AVS storage containers that use that pool.

Figure 2: AVS storage settings showing reserved performance and capacity.

Each storage pool has a minimum effective capacity of 30TiB for billing purposes, with capacity scaling automatically as data grows. Because each storage pool consumes a small block of IP addresses (eight per pool) from its subnet, it’s worth planning sufficient subnet size (e.g., /27 or /24 for production environments), so that you do not hit IP exhaustion as you scale out.

On top of a storage pool, you expose storage to AVS clusters using AVS storage containers. Each storage container maps one‑to‑one to a datastore in your AVS cluster. This mapping keeps the mental model clear: Storage administrators see storage pools and containers in Azure, while VMware administrators work with the familiar datastore concepts in vSphere.

Network and security design are handled in line with Azure best practices. The service is deployed into a dedicated subnet within a VNet you control. For AVS Gen1, the recommended model is to connect that VNet to your AVS private cloud through an ExpressRoute circuit, using an ErGw3Az virtual network gateway and enabling FastPath. This combination gives you a private, high‑throughput path between AVS hosts and Everpure Cloud Azure Native with predictable latency.

Figure 3: Everpure Cloud Azure Native connected to Azure VMware Solution through ExpressRoute.

For AVS Gen2, connectivity is handled within the AVS-managed networking, and you do not need to create an ExpressRoute circuit or associated gateway resources. It’s also important to avoid routing storage traffic over VNet peering links, as that can introduce both additional latency and extra data transfer costs.

From a data protection standpoint, all data stored in Everpure Cloud Azure Native is encrypted using server‑side encryption with 256‑bit AES, and platform‑managed keys are used by default. Encryption at rest is always on, carries no additional performance cost, and cannot be disabled.

AVS as the premier use case

Everpure Cloud Azure Native is the official external storage provider for Azure VMware Solution (AVS), and AVS is the first and deeply integrated use case for the service. When you combine AVS with Everpure Cloud Azure Native, you effectively separate the VMware compute layer from the storage layer while still keeping a VMware‑native experience end to end.

From a compute perspective, you size AVS clusters for CPU and memory. Storage pools then provide the shared block storage capacity for those clusters. This decoupling means that when you need more capacity, you adjust the storage pool rather than add AVS hosts. From a performance standpoint, the service integrates with VMware vSphere Storage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI), allowing ESXi hosts to offload heavy storage operations to the array. That offload reduces CPU and memory load on the AVS nodes and accelerates common workflows like VM provisioning and data refresh operations.

The result is an AVS deployment that feels like a natural extension of an existing VMware estate. You keep using vSphere tools and concepts, but you gain the elasticity, efficiency, and resiliency of a Purity-based storage layer delivered through Azure.

How easy is it to deploy and connect?

Everpure Cloud Azure Native is designed so that bringing external storage to AVS feels like turning on a native feature rather than standing up a separate storage stack. In practice, you enable the service in your subscription, create a storage pool, connect it to your AVS private cloud, and then create datastores from within vSphere. The whole flow is letting you spend more time moving workloads and less time fiddling with storage.

From the Azure portal, you create an Everpure Cloud Azure Native resource in the subscription and region where you want to run AVS and ensure the basic prerequisites are in place. 

Note: In the Azure portal, Everpure Cloud Azure Native appears as Azure Native Pure Storage Cloud Service.

Figure 4: Azure portal search results for Azure Native Pure Storage Cloud Service.

You then create a storage pool, setting an initial performance level, and that’s it. No need to size or deploy arrays, VMs, or disks.

Figure 5: Storage Pools page in Azure Native Pure Storage Cloud Service.

Connecting the storage pool to AVS is a simple workflow in the Azure portal: You pick the AVS you wish to connect and let the service orchestrate the backend configuration. There is no need to manually configure initiators, targets, or LUN mappings. The platform wires up the connectivity, reducing both lead time and the chance of configuration drift.

Figure 6: Connecting Azure VMware Solution from the Storage Pool Overview page.

On the vSphere side, you use the Everpure context menu to create a datastore and choose the storage pool as the backing resource. Once the wizard completes, the datastore looks and behaves like any other VMFS datastore in AVS, but the capacity and performance behind it are driven by Everpure Cloud Azure Native rather than by local AVS nodes. Storage teams gain external, enterprise‑grade capacity, while VMware admins keep using the same workflows they already know.

Figure 7: Creating a datastore using the Pure Storage context menu.

The end result is that storage can be brought online quickly, without provisioning or operating any additional storage infrastructure or learning a new management plane.

What’s next for Everpure Cloud Azure Native?

Everpure Cloud Azure Native continues to evolve with a focus on AVS data protection and on making the service available where customers need it, with the right resiliency characteristics.

On the data protection side, snapshot capabilities for VMFS datastores backed by Everpure Cloud Azure Native are planned. This will be particularly useful for customers lifting and shifting existing on‑premises VMware environments into AVS, as well as for customers moving workloads from Everpure Cloud Dedicated (formerly called Pure Storage Cloud Dedicated) into Azure Native.

Regionally, the service is expanding into additional Azure regions: UK South, West Europe, and North Europe. This helps organizations that must meet data residency and regulatory requirements that mandate in‑country processing. It’s especially relevant for sectors such as financial services and the public sector, where both locality and enterprise‑grade storage behavior are non‑negotiable.

Within the United States, Everpure Cloud Azure Native will expand toward broad zonal coverage across Azure regions that support zonal deployments. With most core US regions now supported in zonal mode and only a small number still in progress, many customers can design AVS deployments that use the same external storage patterns regardless of which supported US region they choose.

Everpure Cloud Azure Native brings a native enterprise block storage experience directly into Azure, tightly integrated with AVS and aligned with Azure’s networking, security, and regional constructs. It lets you move VMware workloads into Azure with enterprise-grade storage behavior, without adding storage complexity.

Getting started with Everpure Cloud Azure Native

As always, there is more to come. For now, you can deploy an Everpure Cloud Azure Native by following our instructions on how to get started or refer to our documentation to learn more. You can also try a free 30-day trial of Everpure Cloud Azure Native. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out, and someone from our team will be happy to assist.