Using Storage Profiles with vCloud Director

VMware vCloud Director can now take advantage of Storage Profiles. This may not be new to you any more, but if you’ve had any trouble configuring them in order to have vCloud Director consume Storage Profiles, please read on. By default, the “*(Any)” Storage Profile is created and used, but what if you want to start doing some storage tiering within your Provider Virtual Datacenter (PvDC)? I’m going to walk you through how to configure and use the storage profiles from beginning to end. Yes, this includes from vCenter all the way through to placing a vApp on that Storage Profile within vCloud Director.

As always, you must have the appropriate licensing in order to enable and utilize Storage Profiles.

You may have already gotten yourself started by reading through Cormac’s extensive blogs around Profile Driven Storage here, and that should have you starting to understand the capabilities we are going to be using. Also, don’t forget about this blog (which also contains a great video towards the bottom) by Tom Stephens which explains why you might want to use Storage Profiles within vCloud Director. Now that we’re all on the same page, let’s get started.

Configuring the Storage Profiles in vCenter

First, create your VM Storage Profiles within vSphere vCenter. In this demonstration, we’ll use the vSphere Web Client, but as you can see from Cormac’s blog, the process is almost exactly the same. In addition to Cormac’s write-up, we’ll be creating the User-Defined Storage Capabilities, too.

Select the VM Storage Profiles link from your home screen in the vSphere Web Client:

Select “Create a new VM Storage Profile:”

Name (and add an optional Description) your Storage Profile and select Ok. We would also select Storage Capabilities here, but we haven’t created these yet. We’ll create them in a following step, but you could do them in either order:

As mentioned by many others, do NOT forget to “enable” the Storage Profiles for your particular clusters:

Select the appropriate Cluster(s) and click “Enable”:

Next, create Storage Capabilities. This is a step people may miss that will prevent your Storage Profiles from showing up in vCloud Director:

I’ve used a naming convention throughout this to keep things consistent. Enter the Name (description optional) and click Ok:

Now that we’ve created the Storage Profiles, we need to assign them to the datastores in our Datastore Clusters. Select “Storage” from the Home screen in the vSphere Web Client:

Create a new Datastore Cluster and add datastores to it if you haven’t done this already:

Now, for each datastore within a Datastore Cluster, “Assign Storage Capabilities” to each one. It’s important to select the same Storage Capability for each datastore in that particular Datastore Cluster (you can also select multiple datastores at the same time and edit them together):

Select the appropriate User-Defined Storage Capability. Again, I’ve selecting the same naming convention here as well:

This concludes created the VM Storage Profiles in vSphere, but now we need to add these Storage Profiles into our vCloud Director environment.

Configuring Storage Profiles within vCloud Director

First, select your Provider Virtual Datacenter and select the “Storage Profiles” tab. Storage Profiles must be assigned to the PvDC before they can be added to and consumed by the Organization Virtual Datacenter (Org vDC):

Select one or more of the available Storage Profiles and click “Add” for each one. Click “Ok” when finished. You don’t have to add all of the Storage Profiles to a particular PvDC:

Next, open the appropriate Organization Virtual Datacenter within that Provider Virtual Datacenter:

Select the “Storage Profiles” tab and click on the plus sign to add Storage Profiles to this Org vDC:

Once added, you can make any (but only one at any one time) of the Storage Profiles the default Storage Profile to be used:

Storage Profiles Not Appearing in vCloud Director

That’s it! We’ve now create VM Storage Profiles in vSphere, and added Storage Profiles to Providers and Organizations within vCloud Director. If you find later on that you are creating more VM Storage Profiles within vSphere and they aren’t appearing for you to add to a PvDC within vCloud Director, go to your vCenters menu within vCD, select the appropriate vCenter, and select “Refresh Storage Profiles.” This should now enable you to add the Storage Profiles to the Providers:

As you are creating vApps, you will find the default Storage Profile is selected, but you can also change the Storage Profile selection, pending you have some available and have the proper permissions to do so: