Introduction

Now that we have a functional VSAN cluster, we can leverage the power of Storage Policy-based Management (SPBM) to control how we deploy our virtual machines (VMs). SPBM is where the administrative power of converged infrastructure becomes apparent. You can define VM-thick provisioning on a sliding scale, define how fault tolerant the VM's storage should be, make distribution and performance decisions, and more. RAID-type decisions for VMs resident on VSAN are also driven through the use of SPBM. VSAN can provide RAID-1 (mirrored) and RAID-0 (striped) configurations, or a combination of the two in the form of RAID-10 (mirrored set of stripes).

All of this is done on a per-VM basis. As the storage and compute infrastructures are now converged, you can define how you want a VM to run in the most logical place—at the VM level or its disks. The need for a datastore-centric configuration, storage tiering, and so on is obviated and made redundant through the power of...