As we continue the StorageMinute series we are going to go into a more specific functionality with a few different vendors. Today’s vendor is Dell EMC on the Unity platform. Each vendor and array can have different capabilities and operations when it comes to vVols.
With Unity series, vVols capabilities are managed via storage pools and capability profiles. When provisioning storage pools on the array, you create different capabilities profiles to be associated with a single vVol datastore. Not requiring multiple datastores for different capabilities is one of the biggest benefits of vVols.
Below we can see the different Capability Profiles mapped from different pools created with different performance levels. With the Unity platform, each profile may have a different size and performance capability.
These profiles are then allocated to a single vVol datastore “Unity-VVol” which is attached to the vSphere hosts.
If the default SPBM policy “VVol No Requirements Policy” is applied to a VM and you have multiple performance tiers, you will notice that, depending on the vVol type, Unity places each vVol in a different tier automatically. Swap in extreme performance, Config in capacity and the Data in Performance to ensure the VM performs optimally. Then, based on application requirements, we can change the SPBM policy for the whole VM or just a specific data disk.
In the video, we will see how we can change the SPBM performance policy for a single disk without migrating the VM to another datastore.
Jason Massae
Technical Marketing Architect, VMware Storage, and Availability
Twitter: @jbmassae
Resources:
- Core.vmware.com: Virtual Volumes
- DELL EMC Unity: Virtualization Integration
