A while back we released the SPBM plugin for vRA a few versions of vRA have been introduced since then and the plugin has had an overhaul to bring it up-to-date with these new versions.
Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM) is the foundation of the VMware SDS Control Plane and enables vSphere administrators to overcome upfront storage provisioning challenges, such as capacity planning, differentiated service levels and managing capacity headroom, whether using vSAN or Virtual Volumes (VVols) on external storage arrays. SPBM provides a single unified control plane across a broad range of data services and storage solutions. The framework helps to align storage with application demands of your virtual machines.
VMware vRealize™ Automation™ empowers IT to accelerate the delivery and ongoing management of personalized, business-relevant infrastructure, application or almost any IT service. Standardized service blueprints combined with automated delivery assures consistency and reliability of the delivered resources. Policy-based governance and logical application modeling assures that multivendor, multi-cloud services are delivered at the right size and service level for the task and that needs to be performed. Full lifecycle management allows infrastructure and applications are maintained at peak operating efficiency. vRealize Automation turns IT into business enablers.
Integrating SPBM into vRealize Automation
Today we are announcing the general availability of the SPBM framework plugin for vRA v2.5.0. The new version has been ruggedized and extended to provide per-vmdk level granularity as well as day two operations for these catalog items allowing users to change SPBM policies on previously-deployed instances. It exposes all SPBM policies in the target to vCenter as a simple drop-down to users at both deploy time and for day two ops.
Be sure to check out the install guide for more details on getting started with the plugin. And there is a comprehensive look into the plugin and how it works available on StorageHub.
Use Cases
A few examples of using the SPBM plugin for vRA are:
- Applying a SPBM policy when provisioning a VM in vRealize Automation. The policy will be set after VM’s been created.
- Applying different policies to VM disks and VM home when provisioning a VM in vRealize Automation.
- Changing storage policies of existing VM in vRealize Automation. The policies will be changed. VM disks and VM home will be migrated by demands.
- Migrating a VM to different vCenter based on a storage policy change in vRealize Automation.
Demo
In the following demo we take a look at deploying a VM from scratch using the SPBM Plugin for vRA, then changing the storage policy on an already existing deployment.
