A cloud account region contains storage profiles that let the cloud administrator define storage for the region in VMware Aria Automation.

What does a storage profile do

Storage profiles include disk customizations, and a means to identify the type of storage by capability tags. Tags are then matched against provisioning service request constraints to create the desired storage at deployment time.

Storage profiles are organized under cloud-specific regions. One cloud account might have multiple regions, with multiple storage profiles under each.

Vendor-independent placement is possible. For example, you might have three different vendor accounts and a region in each. Each region includes a storage profile that is capability tagged as fast. At provisioning time, a request containing a fast hard constraint tag looks for a matching fast capability, regardless of which vendor cloud is supplying the resources. A match then applies the settings from the associated storage profile during creation of the deployed storage item.

Note: Different cloud storage might have different performance characteristics but still be considered the fast offering by the administrator who tagged it.

You can use a capability tag in your storage profile and set that tag as a soft constraint in the storage section of a virtual machine's properties in the cloud template. This action helps the VM prefer that storage profile for placement during deployment. If a matching tag is not present in the storage profile, then the default storage profile for that region is selected during deployment.

Capability tags that you add to storage profiles should not identify actual resource targets. Instead, they describe types of storage. For related information, see Storage resources in VMware Aria Automation.

Default provisioning type

The storage profile provisioning type only establishes a default behavior. The setting doesn't necessarily affect placement and might be overridden by a property in the cloud template.

For example, you might set the storage profile for thin provisioning. In most cases, requests would create thin provisioning storage by default. However, if the cloud template has the provisioningType property set to eager-zero, the cloud template overrides the default of thin.

Note: When you want exact control, it's better to add capability and constraint tags labeled for the desired provisioning type.

For the provisioning type default, a cloud template property overrides a storage profile default, and a storage profile default overrides a default from a vCenter storage policy.

Disk allocation with machines

In a project with multiple cloud zones that belong to different cloud accounts, a disk follows the machine even if the disk isn't attached to the machine. This behavior keeps the resources together to prevent failure when you decide to attach the disk later.

For example, the following design won't work. The cloud template attempts to use location constraints to separate the disk, but the deployment returns a No matching placement error instead.

If you need to place a disk in a different cloud account, use a separate deployment to deploy the disk.

resources:
  Machine1:
    type: Cloud.vSphere.Machine
      properties:
        image: ubuntu
        flavor: small
        constraints:
          - tag: 'location:siteA'
  Disk1:
    type: Cloud.vSphere.Disk
      properties:
        capacityGb: 1
        constraints:
          - tag: 'location:siteB'

Using affinity filters for improved storage/compute recommendations

While earlier VMware Aria Automation releases used a storage filter that selected the first eligible storage option and passed it to downstream filters, the storage filter now passes all the eligible storage options to downstream filters. This allows the compute spread policy to consider and evaluate multiple storage profiles and provide improved storage selections.

First class and standard disks

By using the Disk type option on the storage profile page, or by using the VMware Aria Automation API, you can create a storage profile to support first class disk (FCD) or standard disk storage. In effect, the first class disk option creates a vSphere storage profile.

Storage profile and datastore priority

The priority value of storage profiles and datastore or datastore clusters allows users to manually define how they are selected during deployment.
Note: The assigned storage profile priority does not override the default storage profile. The default storage profile is selected when no constraint tags are included in the relevant cloud template. In such a case, the default storage profile is selected even if it has the lowest priority value of all eligible storage profiles.

You can set the storage profile priority by entering the desired value in the Priority text box. The highest priority value is zero.

Storage profile priority is considered only after the eligible storage profiles are filtered by other factors such as capability tags and available capacity.

The datastore information is found under the Datastore tab. Datastores included in the storage profile can be managed in the following ways:
  • Show all datastores and datastore clusters included in the datacenter.
  • Manually add datastores or datastore clusters that you want to be associated with the storage profile.
  • Dynamically add datastores or datastore clusters based on tags.
To set the datastore priority, select one or more datastores or datastore clusters and click Set priority. Similarly to storage profiles, the highest priority value is zero.

During deployment, VMware Aria Automation first checks the priority of eligible storage profiles and then the priority of the associated datastores or clusters. If multiple storage profiles have the same priority, the latest updated storage profile is selected. If multiple datastores or datastore clusters have the same priority value, they are selected based on available capacity.

For example, your environment might include the storage profiles profile_01 and profile_02 with a priority value of one and profile_03 with a priority value of two. While the first two storage profiles have the same priority, profile_02 was updated more recently, so it is selected for deployment. After selecting the storage profile, VMware Aria Automation checks the priority and available capacity of the datastores and datastore clusters. For example, let's say profile_02 includes two datastores with the same priority value. In this scenario the datastore with highest available capacity is chosen.

Note: If two storage profiles have the same priority and one of them has a compute resource specified while the other does not, higher priority is given to the storage profile with the specified compute resource.

Azure server-side disk encryption

For Azure resources, if you elect to support encryption in a managed disk storage profile, you also select disk encryption that has an associated key. Available encryption and keys correspond to the disk encryption sets configured in Azure for the location.

Azure disk encryption sets