Using vSphere storage policy-based management

Storage policy-based management (SPBM) is the control plane of VMware's management layer for Software-Defined Storage (SDS). SPBM can use the vSphere Storage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) providers to expose storage topologies, capabilities, and state information to vCenter Server. You can also manually define storage capabilities by using tags. For example, you can create tags for replicated and nonreplicated storage. These tags will be assigned to datastores. From the capabilities or tags, you can create SPBM rules, rule sets, and storage policies. These storage policies can be used to create virtual machines on storage that is compliant with a certain storage policy. Storage policies can be exported to XML files, which can be imported later.

Tip

All the SPBM-related cmdlets will only work with vCenter Server 5.5 or higher.

Retrieving storage capabilities

If your storage has a VASA provider, you can use the Get-SpbmCapability cmdlet to retrieve...