Align SLAs with the infrastructure by making vSphere aware of the underlying storage capabilities. With the Storage APIs for Storage Awareness, vSphere can deliver intelligent policy management through alignment and automation.
- Get tighter alignment between vSphere and 3rd party disk arrays
- Simplify storage setup within vSphere
- Integrate with Storage DRS and Profile-Driven Storage
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vSphere Storage APIs for Storage Awareness is a new set of APIs which will enable vSphere to see the capabilities of the storage array LUNs/datastores, making it much easier to select the appropriate disk for virtual machine placement.
Tight Alignment Between vSphere and 3rd Party Disk Arrays
With the Storage Awareness APIs, storage vendors can provide vSphere with information about specific disk arrays for tighter integration between storage and the virtual infrastructure. The shared information includes details on storage health status, configuration, capacity, and thin provisioning. From an administration perspective, this level of detail can now be passed up through vCenter Server to the user.
Simplified and Automated Storage Setup within vSphere
The new storage APIs significantly reduces the number of steps it take administrators, particularly those that may not interact with vSphere on daily basis, to select storage resources. Administrators can now select the most appropriate storage resource when a VM is created since they have high level details of the space, performance, and capabilities of the underlying disk that they can tie to the application or virtual machine SLA.
Integration with Storage DRS and Profile-Driven Storage
Storage DRS utilizes this new set of APIs to better group together storage resources. This means fewer storage resources to manage as well as greater efficiencies in grouping storage with similar properties (speed, size, etc.). In addition, Storage DRS utilizes Storage vMotion to move virtual disks to other datastores. The new Storage Awareness API lets Storage DRS avoid putting virtual disks in a non-optimal location when instructing Storage vMotion where to move a virtual disks.
Profile-Driven Storage can build storage profiles based on the Storage Awareness API. When a virtual machine is deployed, a storage profile can be selected so the virtual machine will be on compliant storage.
The Storage APIs for Storage Awareness are included in the Enterprise Plus Edition and Kit of VMware vSphere. vCenter Server is required to use this feature.
