Default Storage Policies

When you provision a virtual machine on a datastore, you must assign to the virtual machine a compatible VM storage policy. If you do not configure and explicitly assign the storage policy to the virtual machine, the system uses a default storage policy.

VMware-Provided Default Storage Policy

The generic default storage policy that ESXi provides applies to all datastores and does not include rules specific to any storage type.

In addition, ESXi offers the default storage policies for object-based datastores, vSAN or Virtual Volumes. These policies guarantee the optimum placement for the virtual machine objects within the object-based storage.

For information about the default storage policy for Virtual Volumes, see Virtual Volumes and VM Storage Policies.

VMFS and NFS datastores do not have specific default policies and can use the generic default policy or a custom policy you define for them.

User-Defined Default Storage Policies

You can create a VM storage policy that is compatible with vSAN or Virtual Volumes. You can then designate this policy as the default for vSAN and Virtual Volumes datastores. The user-defined default policy replaces the default storage policy that VMware provides.

Each vSAN and Virtual Volumes datastore can have only one default policy at a time. However, you can create a single storage policy with multiple placement rule sets, so that it matches multiple vSAN and Virtual Volumes datastores. You can designate this policy as the default policy for all datastores.

When the VM storage policy becomes the default policy for a datastore, you cannot delete the policy unless you disassociate it from the datastore.