Profile Driven Storage
Managing datastores and matching the SLA requirements of virtual machines with the appropriate datastore can be a challenging and a cumbersome task.
VMware vSphere 5.0 introduces Profile Driven Storage, which will allow for rapid and intelligent provisioning of virtual machines based on SLA requirements and provided storage capabilities.
Using Profile Driven Storage different storage characteristics (typically defined as a tier) can be linked to a VM Storage Profile. These VM Storage Profiles are used during provisioning to ensure only those datastores or datastore clusters that are compliant with the VM Storage Profile are presented. Profile Driven Storage will reduce the amount of manual administration required for virtual machine provisioning while improving virtual machine SLA storage compliance.
Profile Driven Storage delivers these benefits by taking advantage of the following items:
- Integrating with vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness enabling usage of storage characterization supplied by storage vendors.
- Enabling the vSphere administrator to tag storage based on customer or business specific descriptions.
- Using storage characterizations to create virtual machine placement rules in the form of storage profiles.
- Providing easy means to check a virtual machine's compliance against these rules.
Virtual Machine Compliance Status
As mentioned, Profile Driven Storage enables you to check compliance of all virtual machines and the associated virtual disks in a single pane of glass but it also allows you to see this on a per virtual machine basis ensuring that even “virtual machine administrators” who don’t necessarily have access on all the different layers can validate compliance.
As a result, managing storage tiers, virtual machine provisioning and virtual machine storage compliancy in vSphere deployments has become more efficient and user-friendly. Profile Driven Storage removes the need for maintaining complex and tedious spreadsheets and validating compliance manually during every migration or creation of a virtual machine or virtual disk.
