Populating the VM Storage Policies Interface in vSphere

Before you start creating VM storage policies, you must populate the VM Storage Policy interface with information about storage entities and data services that are available in your vSphere storage environment.

This information is obtained from storage providers, also called VASA providers. Another source is datastore tags.

Storage Capabilities and Services

Certain datastores, for example, Virtual Volumes and vSAN, are represented by the storage providers. Through the storage providers, the datastores can advertise their capabilities in the VM Storage Policy interface. These datastore capabilities, data services, and other characteristics with ranges of values populate the VM Storage Policy interface.

You use these characteristics when you define datastore-based placement and service rules for your storage policy.

Data Services

I/O filters on your hosts are also represented by the storage providers. The storage provider delivers information about the data services of the filters to the VM Storage Policy interface. You use this information when defining the rules for host-based data services, also called common rules. Unlike the datastore-specific rules, these rules do not define storage placement and storage requirements for the virtual machine. Instead, they activate the requested I/O filter data services for the virtual machine.

Tags

Generally, VMFS and NFS datastores are not represented by a storage provider. They do not display their capabilities and data services in the VM Storage Polices interface. You can use tags to encode information about these datastores. For example, you can tag your VMFS datastores as VMFS-Gold and VMFS-Silver to represent different levels of service.

For Virtual Volumes and vSAN datastores, you can use tags to encode information that is not advertised by the storage provider, such as geographical location (Palo Alto), or administrative group (Accounting).

Similar to the storage capabilities and characteristics, all tags associated with the datastores appear in the VM Storage Policies interface. You can use the tags when you define the tag-based placement rules.

Use Storage Providers to Populate the VM Storage Policies Interface

For entities represented by storage (VASA) providers, verify that an appropriate provider is registered. After the storage providers are registered, the VM Storage Policies interface becomes populated with information about datastores and data services that the providers represent.

Entities that use the storage provider include vSAN, Virtual Volumes, and I/O filters. Depending on the type of the entity, some providers are self-registered. Other providers, for example, the Virtual Volumes storage provider, must be manually registered. After the storage providers are registered, they deliver the following data to the VM Storage Policies interface:

• Storage capabilities and characteristics for such datastores as Virtual Volumes and vSAN.
• Data services the I/O filters provide.

Prerequisites

Register the storage providers that require manual registration. For more information, see the appropriate documentation:

• Administering VMware vSAN
• Working with VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes
• Filtering Virtual Machine I/O in vSphere

Procedure

1. Browse to the vCenter Server instance.
2. Click the Configure tab, and click Storage Providers.
3. In the Storage Providers list, view the storage providers registered with vCenter Server.
   The list shows general information including the name of the storage provider, its URL and status, storage entities that the provider represents, and so on.
4. To display more details, select a specific storage provider or its component from the list.

Assign Tags to Datastores

Use tags to encode information about a datastore. The tags are helpful when your datastore is not represented by a storage provider and does not advertise its services in the VM Storage Polices interface. You can also use the tags to indicate a property that is not communicated through a storage provider, such as a geographical location or administrative group.

You can apply a new tag that contains general storage information to a datastore. For more details about the tags, their categories, and how to manage the tags, see the vCenter Server and Host Management documentation.

Prerequisites

Required privileges:

• vSphere Tagging.Create vSphere Tag on the root vCenter Server instance
• vSphere Tagging.Create vSphere Tag Category on the root vCenter Server instance
• vSphere Tagging.Assign or Unassign vSphere Tag on the root vCenter Server instance

Procedure

1. In the vSphere Client, create a category for storage tags.
   1. From the Home menu, click Tags & Custom Attributes.
   2. Click the Tags tab and click Categories.
   3. Click the Add Category icon.
   4. Specify the category properties. See the following example.

      Category Property	Example
      Category Name	Storage Location
      Description	Category for tags related to location of storage
      Tags Per Object	Many tags
      Associable Object Types	Datastore and Datastore Cluster
   5. Click OK.
2. Create a storage tag.
   1. On the Tags tab, click Tags.
   2. Click the Add Tag icon.
   3. Specify the properties for the tag. See the following example.

      Tag Property	Example
      Name	Texas
      Description	Datastore located in Texas
      Category	Storage Location

   4. Click OK.
3. Apply the tag to the datastore.
   1. Navigate to the datastore.
   2. Right-click the datastore, and select Tags & Custom Attributes > Assign Tag.
   3. From the list of tags, select an appropriate tag, for example, Texas in the Storage Location category, and click Assign.

Results

The new tag is assigned to the datastore and appears on the datastore Summary tab in the Tags pane.

What to do next

When creating a VM storage policy, you can reference the tag to include the tagged datastore in the list of compatible storage resources. See Create a VM Storage Policy for Tag-Based Placement.

Or you can exclude the tagged datastore from the VM storage policy. For example, your VM storage policy can include Virtual Volumes datastores located in Texas and California, but exclude datastores located in Nevada.

To learn more about how to use tags in VM storage policies, watch the following video.