Using PowerCLI SPBM cmdlets to create VMs with storage policy

Recently I was looking for a way to consume the Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) cmdlets in PowerCLI. I wanted to see if I could provision a VM from a Template onto my vSAN datastore with a particular policy rather than simply change it after it was deployed. It wasn’t as easy as I thought, as some of the commands I tried would only change the VM Home Namespace to the new policy, and leave the disks with the default datastore policy. And when I tried to clone a new VM from a template, I couldn’t get the VM to…

Preventing selection of certain datastores with SPBM

One of the great things about presenting at VMware User Group meetings is actually talking to customers and finding out about what their pain points are, and how  VMware can improve on our products and features. At the most recent VMUG I attended (in Poland), I was asked a question about storage policies, and if there was a way to  allow some users to use some policies, and other users to use a different policy. Unfortunately there is no permissions associated with policies at this time, so any user can select any policy. With that in mind, I had a…