Best way to prevent storage being added to PVDC in vCD 5.1

[thomps01]

Hi,

With vCloud Director 1.5 when I created a new Provider vDC I was shown all available datastores presented to my vCenter and could pick exactly which ones I'd like to include in the pVDC.

I've now deployed vCloud Director 5.1 although my ESXi hosts are still 5.0 and the option seems to have changed. Know you're just given the *(Any) choice for storage profiles and every datastore is dragged into the pVDC.

This is an issue for me because all of my boot LUNs are being included wihin the pVDC as available storage and clearly that's not what they are.

I know I can go into the manage and monitor tab, select datastores & clusters from the left and then manually disable each of my boot LUNs, but it doesn't seem right that I have to include a LUN inside a pVDC and then disable it.

Am I doing this the only way possible?

Oh, by the way I forgot to mention that we don't use storage profiles and don't have any storage providers configured in vCenter. This is because I've not loaded any array plug-ins to determine the disk types.

[iceman76 · Accepted solution]

Well, Storage Profiles do the trick. Even if your storage array has no built-in storage capabilities, you can define your own capabilities, add capabilties to all datastores of a type, and assign capabilities to a storage profile. You can then add datastores/datastore clusters based on a profile to the provider vdc.

Of course it requires Storage Profiles and the right edition of vSphere.

Thats only a short secription how to do it, but the vmware documentation is quite good about it

[thomps01]

Thanks, this is very helpful.

I've not worked with storage profiles before since pretty much all of my storage is single tier but I've just tested what you suggested and it works a treat.

So I'm going to create 2 types of user defined capabilities called boot LUNs and VM storage.

Thanks again - full marks