Follow these best practices when provisioning storage containers on the vSphere Virtual Volumes array side.

Creating Containers Based on Your Limits

Because storage containers apply logical limits when grouping virtual volumes, the container must match the boundaries that you want to apply.

Examples might include a container created for a tenant in a multitenant deployment, or a container for a department in an enterprise deployment.
  • Organizations or departments, for example, Human Resources and Finance
  • Groups or projects, for example, Team A and Red Team
  • Customers

Putting All Storage Capabilities in a Single Container

Storage containers are individual datastores. A single storage container can export multiple storage capability profiles. As a result, virtual machines with diverse needs and different storage policy settings can be a part of the same storage container.

Changing storage profiles must be an array-side operation, not a storage migration to another container.

Avoiding Over-Provisioning Your Storage Containers

When you provision a storage container, the space limits that you apply as part of the container configuration are only logical limits. Do not provision the container larger than necessary for the anticipated use. If you later increase the size of the container, you do not need to reformat or repartition it.

Using Storage-Specific Management UI to Provision Protocol Endpoints

Every storage container needs protocol endpoints (PEs) that are accessible to ESXi hosts.

When you use block storage, the PE represents a proxy LUN defined by a T10-based LUN WWN. For NFS storage, the PE is a mount point, such as an IP address or DNS name, and a share name.

Typically, configuration of PEs is array-specific. When you configure PEs, you might need to associate them with specific storage processors, or with certain hosts. To avoid errors when creating PEs, do not configure them manually. Instead, when possible, use storage-specific management tools.

No Assignment of IDs Above Disk.MaxLUN to Protocol Endpoint LUNs

By default, an ESXi host can access LUN IDs that are within the range of 0 to 1023. If the ID of the protocol endpoint LUN that you configure is 1024 or greater, the host might ignore the PE.

If your environment uses LUN IDs that are greater than 1023, change the number of scanned LUNs through the Disk.MaxLUN parameter. See Change the Number of Scanned Storage Devices.