The Storage DRS (SDRS) I/O Load Balancer, SDRS I/O Reservations-based load balancer, and vSphere Storage I/O Control Components will be removed in a future vSphere release. Existing vSphere 8 and vSphere 7 releases will continue to support this functionality.
About Storage DRS and Storage IO Control
Storage DRS (SDRS) was introduced in vSphere 5.0 with the objective of providing efficient storage resource management for VMs in a vSphere Cluster. Storage IO Control (SIOC) was introduced in vSphere 4.1 with the objective of providing congestion control and solving a noisy neighbour problem where a single VM could inundate the shared storage and starve other VMs from getting their fair share of the backend storage.
What functionality is deprecated in SDRS and SIOC with vSphere 8 Update 3?
- Initial Placement and Load balancing based on IO latencies (SDRS IO Load Balancer).
- Initial Placement and Load balancing based on IO reservations.
- Usage of Reservations and Shares in SIOC VM Storage Policies.
- Enablement of SIOC on a datastore.
See the Product Support Notices in the vCenter 8 Update 3 release notes.
What functionality is not impacted by this deprecation announcement?
- Initial placement and load balancing based on datastore space constraints within a datastore cluster.
- Evacuation of VMDKs as part of a datastore being placed into maintenance mode.
- Use of limits in SIOC VM Storage Policies.
All current existing SDRS and SIOC features available in vSphere 8 and vSphere 7 will continue to be available and supported for the lifecycle of vSphere 8 and vSphere 7.
Note: Other product workflows and automations may need to be reviewed and updated when the above capabilities are removed in a future vSphere release.
What does deprecated mean?
When a feature is announced as “deprecated” that means that the feature is intended to be removed in a later version of vSphere. It does not mean that the feature is unsupported in the current version of vSphere.
