Assign the Virtual Volumes Storage Policy to Virtual Machines

To guarantee that the Virtual Volumes datastore fulfills specific storage requirements when allocating a virtual machine, associate the Virtual Volumes storage policy with the virtual machine.

You can assign the Virtual Volumes storage policy during an initial deployment of a virtual machine, or when performing other virtual machine operations, such as cloning or migrating. This topic describes how to assign the Virtual Volumes storage policy when you create a new virtual machine. For information about other VM provisioning methods, see the vSphere Virtual Machine Administration documentation.

You can apply the same storage policy to the virtual machine configuration file and all its virtual disks. If storage requirements for your virtual disks and the configuration file are different, you can associate different storage policies with the VM configuration file and the selected virtual disks.

Procedure

1. In the vSphere Web Client, start the virtual machine provisioning process and follow appropriate steps.
2. Assign the same storage policy to all virtual machine files and disks.
   1. On the Select Storage page, select the storage policy compatible with Virtual Volumes, for example VVols Silver, from the VM Storage Policy drop-down menu.
   2. Select the Virtual Volumes datastore from the list of available datastores.
   3. If you use the replication service with Virtual Volumes, specify the replication group.
      Replication groups indicate which VMs and virtual disks must be replicated together to a target site.

      Option	Description
      Preconfigured replication group	Replication groups that are configured in advance on the storage side. vCenter Server and ESXi discover the replication groups, but do not manage their life cycle.
      Automatic replication group	Virtual Volumes creates a replication group and assigns all VM objects to this group.

   The datastore becomes the destination storage resource for the virtual machine configuration file and all virtual disks.
3. Change the storage policy for the virtual disk.
   Use this option if requirements for storage placement are different for virtual disks.
   1. On the Customize Hardware page, expand the New hard disk pane.
   2. From the VM storage policy drop-down menu, select the appropriate storage policy, for example VVols Gold, that you want to assign to the virtual disk.
   3. For replication, specify or modify the replication group. If you use the automatic replication group for the virtual machine, you cannot change it to the preconfigured group for the virtual disk.
4. Complete the virtual machine provisioning process.

Results

After you create the virtual machine, the Summary tab displays the assigned storage policies and their compliance status.

What to do next

If storage placement requirements for the configuration file or the virtual disks change, you can later modify the virtual policy assignment. See Change Storage Policy Assignment for Virtual Machine Files and Disks.