vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-55-storage-guide

vSphere StorageA storage system can advertise multiple capabilities. The capabilities are grouped into one or morecapability profile. Capabilities outline the quality of service that the storage system can deliver. Theyguarantee that the storage system can provide a specific set of characteristics for capacity, performance,availability, redundancy, and so on.Vendor specific capabilities appear in the Storage Policy-Based Management system. When you create astorage policy for your virtual machine, you reference these vendor specific storage capabilities, so that yourvirtual machine is placed on the datastore with these capabilities.For more information about storage providers, see Chapter 26, “Using Storage Providers,” on page 253.Tag-Based Storage CapabilitiesYou can use tags to create user-defined storage capabilities and apply those tags to datastores. You canapply more than one tag to a datastore.Typically, tag-based capabilities serve the following purposes:• Encode policy-relevant information that is not advertised through vStorage APIs for StorageAwareness, such as geographical location or administrative group.• Attach a broad storage level definition to a datastore that is not represented by any storage provider.All tags applied to datastores appear in the Storage Policy-Based Management system. As with vendorspecific capabilities, you can use the tags when you create storage policies.Assign Tags to DatastoresWhen your datastore is not represented by a storage provider and does not display its capabilities in theStorage Profile-Based Management system, use tags to encode information about the datastore. You canthen reference these tags when defining a storage policy for a virtual machine.You can apply a new tag that contains storage information to a datastore. For information about tags, theircategories, and how to manage tags, see the vCenter Server and Host Management documentation.Procedure1 Browse to a datastore in the vSphere Web Client inventory.2 Click the Manage tab and click Tags.3 Click the New Tag icon.4 In the vCenter Server drop-down menu, select the vCenter Server instance on which to create the tag.5 Type a name and a description for the tag.For example, you can specify a broad storage level definition, or indicate a property that is notcommunicated through a storage provider, such as geographical location or administrative group.Tag PropertyNameDescriptionExampleFault tolerance.Storage that has a capacity over 2TB and is fault-tolerant.6 In the Category drop-down menu, select an existing category or create a category.7 Click OK.The new tag is assigned to the datastore.What to do nextYou can reference the tag when adding tag-based rules to the storage policy. The datastore appears on a listof compatible storage resources for virtual machines that use the policy.196 VMware, Inc.