Quickly and intelligently provision applications while ensuring application service levels match available storage with vSphere Profile-Driven Storage. You'll lower capital and operating expenditures by gaining visibility into your storage pool.

• Streamline storage provisioning
• Ensure application service levels match available storage
• Allocate storage without complex coordination

Streamline storage provisioning by providing vSphere administrators the ability to overcome upfront storage provisioning challenges, such as capacity planning, differentiated service levels, and managing capacity headroom. vSphere Profile-Driven Storage, with full HCL compatibility, lets vSphere administrators meet the demands of growing business needs by letting them provision datastores at scale, eliminating the need to provision virtual machines on a case-by-case basis.

• Manage initial and ongoing placement of virtual machines based on pre-defined requirements
• Create datastore clusters to support Storage DRS
• Gain deep insight into storage characteristics via integration with vSphere APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA)

Matching application service levels to the available storage is difficult when you must manually choose between different datastores and different storage tiers. And the right service level of the application is often not known or changes over its lifecycle. With vSphere Profile-Driven Storage, vSphere administrators can ensure application service levels match the available storage and minimize needs for constant monitoring and troubleshooting.

• Use compliance checks to ensure a virtual machine is always on appropriate storage
• Find non-compliant virtual machines and correct the error via Storage vMotion

Managing storage allocations to support dynamic environments can require extensive coordination between application owners, virtual machine owners and storage administrators, often resulting in downtime for critical applications. The improved agility of Profile-Driven Storage lets storage administrators do their job without causing interruptions in service and without the need for coordination among multiple groups.

• Improve application uptime and business continuity
• Reduce coordination between administrative groups
• Reduce effort levels to properly allocate storage

Profile Driven Storage is included in the VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus edition.

Managing datastores and matching the SLA requirements of virtual machines with the appropriate datastore can be challenging and cumbersome tasks. vSphere 5.0 introduced Profile-Driven Storage, which allows for rapid and intelligent placement of virtual machines based on SLA, availability, performance or other requirements and provided storage capabilities.

Using Profile-Driven Storage, various storage characteristics, typically defined as a tier, can be requested in a virtual machine storage profile. These profiles are used during provisioning, cloning and Storage vMotion to ensure that only those datastores or datastore clusters that are compliant with the virtual machine storage profile are made available. The virtual machine storage profile can also help select a similar type of datastores when creating a Storage DRS datastore cluster. Profile-Driven Storage will reduce the amount of manual administration required for virtual machine placement while improving virtual machine SLA storage compliance.

Figure 1. Virtual Machine Storage Profile

Profile-Driven Storage delivers these benefits by taking advantage of the following:

• Full integration with VASA, enabling usage of storage characterization supplied by storage vendors
• Support for NFS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel (FC) storage, and all storage arrays on the HCL
• Enabling the vSphere administrator to tag storage based on customer- or business-specific descriptions
• Using storage characterizations and/or administrator-defined descriptions to create virtual machine placement rules in the form of storage profiles
• Providing an easy means to check a virtual machine’s compliance with these rules, ensuring a virtual machine is not deployed or migrated to an incorrect type of storage without the administrator’s being informed

Virtual Machine Compliance Status

Check compliance of all virtual machines and the associated virtual disks in a single pane of glass (Figure 2) or view this on a per–virtual machine basis, ensuring that even “virtual machine administrators” who don’t necessarily have access to all the different layers can validate compliance on the virtual machine summary’s tab (Figure 3).

Figure 2. VM Storage Profiles single pane of glass for compliance

Figure 3. Per–Virtual Machine Profile Compliance

As a result, managing storage tiers, provisioning, migrating, cloning virtual machines and correct virtual machine placement in vSphere deployments have 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.