Datastore Cluster configuration

[mweschle]

Hey guys,

I got some questions about datastore clusters, also we want to make some things easier for our support an on boarding teams.

We dont have any experience with datastore clusters so maybe you can help me.

Is it possible to just use some storage policys or datastore cluster while creating vms so i dont have to manually place the vm on my desired storage tier?

Plan is simple i want to tag some datastores as "Storage Tier1" or "Storage Tier3" so when i add a new vm i just have to pick the correct storage tier and vmware automatically picks the right datastore for my desired tier. I dont need to know the exact datastore, only the storage tier has to be the right one. We're not using vsan but we have a central storage all esxi servers have connection to.

Also were not using any ressource pools, which also would be a part to which i want to switch later on.

Thanks in advance!

[IRIX201110141 · Accepted solution]

I think we use it in the same way you want....

1. We group similar Datastores (LUNS with same type of performance and feature level(Dedup,Compress,Mirroring,Snapshots ) together and create a DatastoreCluster of them. 3 and up to 10 Datastores within one Cluster
2. Than add some TAGS to the Datastore and to the Cluster... for example "Gold", "SSD", "Performance", "Mirrored", "Location"
3. Create a Storage Policy labeld "Gold" and based on the TAGs you want. The Tags works as a filter.

When ever you create a VM or move VMs around you can select your "Gold" Policy from the list of StoragePolicies and the GUI will only show the DatastoreCluster(s) which are compatible as a available target.  vCenter will select a Datastore from the Cluster which have the most capacity and lowest latency and place the VM there.

In real live our Profiles use VASA+TAGs and we have a half dozen of StorageClusters.

Regards,
Joerg

[mweschle]

Thats exactly what i meant! 

I will try this today on our test environment.

Do you also use features like storage drs?

[mweschle]

After testing everything it looks good, the only thing i couldn't find out is that as i create a new vm and choose the storage policy there are still all datastores shown in the table.

I made the tags and everything correct but the filter is not hiding the datastores that are not compatible. They are also shown but with a remark that they are not compatible.

Is there any possibility to hide those entrys?

[IRIX201110141]

No... if you create a VM from Scratch its step 4 in the wizzard there you can specfy the Storage Policy of your choice. We always create VMs from a Template or better wie Clone a existing VM which is shutdown.

Unfortunately all Datastore are displayed but the compatible ones are always on the top of the list.

Regards,
Joerg

[IRIX201110141]

About sDRS. We have it on "manually" because we have some kind of intelligent Hybrid/Dynamic RAID Storage and we dont want that vSphere starts moving VMs around because for the SAN this would be new and Hot data which we would to avoid.

So only vDRS make suggestions or create a E-Mail notification.

Regards,
Joerg