Storage Policy Based Management

Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) is relatively new to the vSphere world. It got introduced with vSphere 5.0 and has been quite enhanced since then. The basic principle of SPBM is to manage the storage in form of VMFS data stores based on precreated policies instead of trying to figure out their function by their name.

Typically, organizations picked a distinct name scheme to apply to the data stores to identify their capabilities. Such a name could look like:

S1PDR040

This is a code to identify what this VMFS data store has to offer. Translated it means:

• S1 = site 1
• P = production
• DR = disaster recovery/replicated data store
• 040 =LUN ID to identify in ESXi/storage system

All the admins have to know all this abbreviations and codes to quickly identify where a VM should be deployed. While Storage DRS adds one simplification for that since all VMFS of a kind and site could be put together in a big storage cluster, SPBM adds another solution. It can create...