Introduction

In this chapter, we will learn how to use storage profiles to ensure that the VMs are placed in appropriate datastores and how to use Storage I/O Control to manage queue bandwidth between VMs.

Before we begin with the configuration tasks, it will be beneficial to understand the concepts.

Profile-driven storage

Profile-driven storage will allow an administrator to group datastores under profiles based on the datastore's capability. The capabilities can be related to the capacity, performance, and redundancy characteristics. The capabilities can either be learned via VASA (vSphere Storage API for Storage Awareness) if the storage array supports the API, or they can be user defined. Once the profiles are defined, the virtual machine disks can be associated to these profiles. This will allow vSphere to make VM placement decisions.

Storage I/O Control (SIOC)

SIOC is used to throttle the VMkernel device queue depth of a LUN, based on the shares set on the virtual machine disks contending...