Within a software-defined data center, Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) plays a major role by helping to align storage with application demands of your virtual machines. It provides a storage policy framework that serves as a single unified control panel across a broad range of data services and storage solutions.

As an abstraction layer, SPBM abstracts storage services delivered by Virtual Volumes, vSAN, I/O filters, or other storage entities.

Rather than integrating with each individual type of storage and data services, SPBM provides a universal framework for different types of storage entities.

The graphic shows the SPBM layer as an abstraction layer above the datastores and I/O filters.

SPBM offers the following mechanisms:

  • Advertisement of storage capabilities and data services that storage arrays and other entities, such as I/O filters, offer.
  • Bidirectional communications between ESXi and vCenter Server on one side, and storage arrays and entities on the other.
  • Virtual machine provisioning based on VM storage policies.