vSphere Plugin: Creating the vVol Datastore

Once the Storage Providers are registered, the vVol datastore can be created and mounted using the vSphere plugin. The workflow can also be found in the demo video at this point ​. The ESXi hosts will need to have been added to the FlashArray; the best practice is to correlate the ESXi cluster to a FlashArray host group. Each ESXi host that is in that cluster should be added to the FlashArray host group.

1. Right Click on the ESXi cluster to create and mount the vVol datastore. Go to the Pure Storage option and then click on Create Datastore.
2. Choose to create a vVol FlashArray Storage Container (vVol Datastore).
3. Select the ESXi Cluster that will be the compute resource to mount the vVol Datastore to. The best practice for vVols is to mount the vVol Datastore to the host group and not individual ESX hosts. Why is this important? During this step, the plugin will check to see that the host group on the FlashArray is connected to a protocol endpoint. In the event that there is no connection, the plugin will automatically connect the protocol endpoint on that FlashArray to the host group. Best practice is to connect PEs to host groups and not to individual ESXi hosts.
4. Select a FlashArray to back the vVol datastore.
5. Select an existing container or, optionally create a new container. If using an existing container, select the container to use. Please note- for the purposes of FlashArrays that are versions of Purity 6.4.2 or higher, multiple storage containers are managed through the pod object on FlashArray.
6. Populate the datastore name to be created. The container name is not editable because an existing container was selected, so the name selected from the previous window is pre-populated.
7. Optional . If new container was selected, populate the datastore name. If the datastore name should match the container name, check the Same as datastore name checkbox. Optionally, uncheck the checkbox and populate the container name field. Finally, populate the container quota value with the size of the datastore in vSphere. This will set a capacity quota on the pod on the FlashArray.
8. Review the information and finish the workflow.
9. From the datastore Page, click on the newly created vVol datastore and then check the connectivity with the hosts in the ESXi cluster to ensure that they are connected and healthy.