Use virtual machine storage policies, formerly called virtual machine storage profiles, to ensure that virtual machines are placed to storage that guarantees a specific level of capacity, performance, availability, redundancy, and so on.

When you define a storage policy, you specify storage requirements for applications that would run on virtual machines. After you apply this storage policy to a virtual machine, the virtual machine is placed to a specific datastore that can satisfy the storage requirements.

You manage storage placement by using storage policies.

  1. If you use storage policies in conjunction with storage providers, verify that an appropriate storage provider is registered.

    See Using Storage Providers.

  2. Apply storage capability tags to datastores. See Assign Tags to Datastores.
  3. Enable storage policies for a host or cluster. See Enable Virtual Machine Storage Policies.
  4. Create storage policies by defining requirements for applications running on a virtual machine. See Define a Storage Policy for a Virtual Machine.
  5. Associate a storage policy with the virtual machine files or virtual disks. See Apply a Storage Policy to a Virtual Machine.
  6. Verify that virtual machines and virtual disks use datastores that are compliant with the assigned storage policy. See Check Storage Compliance for a Virtual Machine.