vSphere 7u1 - prohibit placing vCLS VMs on NFS datastores

[Czernobog]

Does anyone know if there is a way to prohibit placing the vCLS VMs on a NFS Datastore? Or if NFS-Shares cannot be generally "deselected", then prohibit placing of the vCLS VMs on specific datastores in the environment?

I now move them by hand from the NFS Datastore to FC backed Datastores, however this is somehow possible only to do for one at a time - when I select 2 or more, the vSphere CLient gets stuck, I assume at the SDRS placement calculation.

I am currently running vSphere 7 in a test environemnt with only a few clusters, however I cannot really imagine pushing hundreds of the vCLS VMs per hand in production.

TBH I do not even know exactly why this specific NFS Datastore is selected for the deployment. I could not find an option that would determine this selection, neither in the vCenter nor on the cluster. The KB article describing this new feature also did not elp in this regard: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/80472

I assume moving the VMs to another datastore can be automated, but still, I would like preventing the deployment of vCLS at all on NFS shares or just specific datastores.

[depping]

No, there's no way of prohibiting it unfortunately. I have already filed a feature request for this. For now, you will need to manually move the VM if it has been placed on a datastore where it shouldn't have been. I wrote a post on vCLS with Q&A here: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2020/10/09/vmware-vsphere-clustering-services-vcls-considerations-quest...

[Czernobog]

Thanks, I just saw your blog post earlier and am thinking about an alternative solution. I had the idea work with setting a tag on the NFS datastore and creating a storage profile, where the placement of vms would be prohibited on the tagged datastore. The configuration would look like this:

Applying the profile does not change the placement of currently running vm's, that have already be placed on the NFS datastore, so I would have to create a new cluster if it takes effect during provisioning.

No idea if the CLS vms are affected at all by the profiles.

[depping]

the problem probably is that during the time of provisioning of the VM, the VMs being provisioned are not tagged. I informed the engineering team about the issue, and they hope they can introduce a preferred datastore list of some kind in the future.

[wsmwk]

This is possible as of update 3