When you enable a stateful service on a Supervisor in vSphere IaaS control plane, the vSAN Data Persistence platform creates default storage policies and corresponding storage classes and assigns them to the service namespace. The policies are for vSAN Shared-Nothing-Architecture (SNA) and vSAN Direct datastores. Instead of the default, you can create custom storage policies.

To decide which type of datastore to use, follow these general recommendations:
  • Use vSAN Direct if you are creating a dedicated hardware cluster for the shared nothing cloud-native services.
  • Use vSAN with SNA when you want the cloud-native stateful application to share the physical infrastructure with other regular VMs or Kubernetes workloads. Each workload can define its own storage policy and can get the best of both worlds from a single cluster.

For more information, see vSphere Shared Nothing Storage.

After you create the policy, you can assign it to the namespace where your stateful service runs. See Create and Configure a vSphere Namespace on the Supervisor.

Create vSAN Direct Storage Policy

If you use vSAN Direct, create a storage policy to be used with a Supervisor namespace. On the namespace that you associate with this storage policy, you can run workloads compatible with vSAN Direct, for example, stateful services or instance storage VMs.

Procedure

  1. In the vSphere Client, open the Create VM Storage Policy wizard.
    1. In the Home menu, click Policies and Profiles.
    2. Under Policies and Profiles, click VM Storage Policies.
    3. Click Create.
  2. Enter the policy name and description.
    Option Action
    vCenter Server Select the vCenter Server instance.
    Name Enter the name of the storage policy.
    Description Enter the description of the storage policy.
  3. On the Policy structure page under Datastore specific rules, enable rules for vSAN Direct storage placement.
  4. On the vSAN Direct rules page, specify vSAN Direct as a storage placement type.
  5. On the Storage compatibility page, review the list of vSAN Direct datastores that match this policy.
  6. On the Review and finish page, review the storage policy settings and click Finish.
    To change any settings, click Back to go to the relevant page.

Create vSAN SNA Storage Policy

If you use vSAN with vSAN Data Persistence platform, you can create a vSAN Shared Nothing Architecture (SNA) storage policy to be used with the namespace where stateful services run.

Procedure

  1. In the vSphere Client, open the Create VM Storage Policy wizard.
    1. In the Home menu, click Policies and Profiles.
    2. Under Policies and Profiles, click VM Storage Policies.
    3. Click Create.
  2. Enter the policy name and description.
    Option Action
    vCenter Server Select the vCenter Server instance.
    Name Enter the name of the storage policy, for example, Sample SNA Thick.
    Description Enter the description of the storage policy.
  3. On the Policy structure page under Datastore specific rules, enable rules for vSAN storage placement.
  4. On the vSAN page, click the Availability tab and select the following values. The values are only applicable for SNA workloads on the vSAN Data Persistence platform. They cannot be used for provisioning VM workloads.
    Option Description
    Option Value
    Site disaster tolerance None - standard cluster
    Note: vSAN Data Persistence platform supports only standard clusters.
    Failures to tolerate No data redundancy with host affinity
    Thick provisioning enforced for SNA workloads and is selected as a value for object space reservation on the Advanced Policy Rules tab. You cannot change this value.
  5. On the Storage compatibility page, review the list of vSAN datastores that match this policy.
  6. On the Review and finish page, review the storage policy settings and click Finish.
    To change any settings, click Back to go to the relevant page.