Profile Driven Storage is a feature that allows you to ‘describe’ storage capabilities such as capacity, performance, replication etc. This is basically ‘tagging’ storage/datastores with certain characteristics, either supplied by the storage vendor or user defined. You can then create storage profiles that make use of these capabilities, and assign these profiles to virtual machines. Like with host profiles, you can then check whether a virtual machine is compliant with its attached storage profile.
All this is a bit more clear with an example, so I’ll go through the process.
If your storage is VASA compliant then it should advertise its capabilities. If not, as with my test lab, you can create your own custom capabilities. Start by clicking on “VM Storage Profiles” on the vCenter Home screen then select “Manage Storage Capabilities”.
Creating Profiles and Capabilities
You can now define your custom storage capabilities e.g. Replication, or SATA. Here I’ve just created one called Test.
You can now create a Storage Profile which references one or more of those capabilities:
The next step is to link our capabilities to our datastores. This is done by right clicking on the datastore:
Note that this step is only required if the storage array isn’t advertising its capabilities to vCenter. The next step is to go back to the VM Storage Profiles screen and Enable Storage Profiles:
Assigning Storage Profiles to Virtual Machines
The last step in the process is to assign storage profiles to your virtual machines. You do this in the VM settings screen:
Each disk can be assigned a different profile if necessary, or all disks can be given the same one. After committing the changes then navigating back to the virtual machine’s summary screen you will see something along the lines of:
In this case the VM isn’t compliant as it is currently on a datastore which doesn’t have the capabilities specified in the VMs attached storage profile. At this point we can migrate the virtual machine to a datastore which does have the capabilities, then Refresh. If all has gone well then you should see the following…
