AND and OR Rules in Storage Policies

I was recently working in an environment where my vCenter server was managing two vSAN clusters, each with its own datastore. I wanted to be able to choose which datastore to provision to via storage policy, but came across some unexpected behaviour. When I configured my vSAN Rule and my Tag Rule, it seems that both datastores would appear as compliant to the policy. I found out the reason, and decided to write it up as I had never known this was how policies AND and OR rules behaved until now. Setting up Tags I created a Tags Category called…

New vRealize Automation, Cloud Assembly integration with SPBM

At VMworld last year, Duncan Epping and I presented on the power of Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM for short). You can find all of the slides and recordings here. One of the demos we used in the presentation was deploying virtual machines via vRealize Automation, and showing how to consume a storage policy on vSAN. This was using a vRealize Automation plugin, and to be honest, it was a little bit challenging to get it to work. And it wasn’t really a VMware plugin per-se, but something developed by our field team. Today, I’m pleased to announce that we…

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…

See you at VMworld 2018

Yes, it’s that time of year again. VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas is taking place next month. Once again, as per previous years, I will be co-presenting on a few sessions. It will be no surprise that, once again, my sessions are focused on storage, hyper-convergence and predominantly vSAN. However, this year I will also be presenting with my CTO and VMware Fellow, Christos Karamanolis, for the very first time. Without further ado, let me go through my sessions in a bit more details, and if they look interesting to you, feel free to sign up. I also included a…

A closer look at VVol snapshot policies on Pure Storage with vSphere 6.7

I am in the very fortunate position of having access to a Pure Storage array, and this has been recently updated to support Virtual Volumes. With my new 6.7 vSphere cluster, I finally found some time to take a closer look at Virtual Volume (VVol) snapshots on the Pure array, something that I have been meaning to do for some time. For those of you who are new to Virtual Volumes (VVols), one of the major advantages is the granularity at which certain operations can now be done. In the past, we were always dealing with data services at the…

Workflow issues when vCenter instance not correctly added to vRO

As part of my preparation work for VMworld 2018, I was looking into how one might be able to automate the deployment of VMs from vRealize Automation 7.4 with an appropriate policy for consuming the under-lying storage. In my case, this underlying storage was vSAN 6.7 (and vSphere 6.7), so I wanted to be able to select a vSAN policy for my VM Home namespace and disks. Fortunately, there is a vRealize Orchestration (vRO) plugin to do just that called the vRA SPBM Integration plugin. But, once I had this plugin installed, and followed the instructions, I hit a snag.…