vSphere 5 What's New - Profile Driven Storage
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The document discusses the benefits of profile-driven storage in vSphere 5, focusing on reducing operational expenses by minimizing repetitive planning for VM storage placement. It highlights the need for administrators to match VM requirements with physical storage properties and emphasizes the importance of storage awareness through vCenter integration. Additionally, it details the use of storage capabilities and compliance visibility, enhancing management functionality and reducing troubleshooting time.
vSphere 5 What's New - Profile Driven Storage
- 1. vSphere 5 What’s New - Profile-Driven Storage
- 2. Why Profile-Driven Storage? Save OPEX by reducing repetitive planning and effort! Minimize per-VM (or per VM request) “thinking” or planning for storage placement. • Admin needs to identify VM storage requirements and match to physical storage properties. Increase probability of “correct” storage placement and use (minimize need for troubleshooting, minimize time for troubleshooting). • Admin needs more insight into storage characteristics. • Admin needs ability to custom-tag available storage. • Admin needs easy means to identify incorrect VM storage placement (e.g. on incorrect datastore).
- 3. Storage Capabilities & Profile-Driven Storage Compliant Not Compliant VM Storage Profile associated with VM VM Storage Profile referencing Storage Capabilities Storage Capabilities surfaced by VASA or user-defined
- 4. Selecting a Profile During Provisioning By selecting a VM Storage Profile, datastores are now split into Compatible & Incompatible. The Celerra_NFS datastore is the only datastore which meets the GOLD Profile requirements – i.e. it is the only datastore that has our user-defined storage capability associated with it.
- 5. Profile-Driven Storage Compliance Profile Compliance is visible from the Virtual Machine Summary tab.
- 6. vSphere Storage APIs for Storage Awareness Storage Awareness is an Extension of the vSphere Storage APIs, vCenter-based extensions. It allows storage arrays to integrate with vCenter for management functionality via server-side plug-ins or Vendor Providers. This in turn allows a vCenter administrator to be aware of the topology, capabilities, and state of the physical storage devices available to the cluster. VASA enables several features. • For example it delivers System-defined (array-defined) Capabilities that can greatly enhance Profile-Driven Storage. • Another example is that it provides array internal information that helps several Storage DRS use cases to work optimally with various arrays.
- 7. Storage Capabilities Once the Vendor Provider has been successfully added to vCenter, the profiles should also display the storage capabilities provided to it by the Vendor Provider. The above example contains a ‘mock-up’ of some possible Storage Capabilities as displayed in the profiles. These are retrieved from the Vendor Provider.
- 8. Save OPEX by Reducing Repetitive Planning and Effort! Periodically Identify Find optimal Create VM check Today requirements datastore compliance Initial setup Identify storage Periodically characteristics Identify Storage Create VM check requirements compliance DRS Group datastores Initial setup Discover storage characteristics Select VM Storage DRS + Create VM Profile-Driven Storage profile Group Storage datastores