Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) helps administrators automate VM provisioning on appropriate storage devices with requested data services. This avoids laborious manual provisioning of storage for individual VMs. For object-based datastores like vSAN and VVol, vendors formulate metadata describing storage traits, and advertise storage capabilities for profile queries.
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Storage Capabilities The storage provider describes capabilities of a storage array, which the storage policy service obtains and presents to the administrator to assist with VM provisioning.
Virtual Machine Storage Virtual machine configuration and virtual disk data reside in datastores.
Storage Capability Profiles To use a storage capability profile, you define storage requirements and associate a virtual machine with a storage policy. When you create a VM, vCenter Server correlates its VM storage policy with the storage policy service to determine an appropriate location for VM home and virtual disk files.
Storage Policy Operations The Storage Policy API is implemented with Web Services Description Language (WSDL), as an XML file describing how to communicate with it. The WSDL is usable with toolkit bindings by many programming languages, including Java.
Access to the Storage Policy Server You can access the VMware Storage Policy Server by connecting to a vCenter Server system and obtaining a vCenter session cookie.
Storage Profile Queries The Storage Policy API includes several methods that you can use to query for profiles and vSphere entities, such as datastores, virtual machines, and virtual disks.
VMware Storage Policy SDK The VMware Storage Policy SDK is distributed as part of the VMware vSphere Management SDK.