Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM)

There are a few aspects of utilizing Storage Policies with vVols and the FlashArray to keep in mind when managing your vSphere Environment.

• Storage Policies can be compatible with one or multiple replication groups (FlashArray protection groups).
  • While storage policies can be compatible with multiple replication groups, when applying the policy to a VM, mutliple replication groups should not be used. The VM should be part of a single consistency group.
    Note: AWS offload is not supported with storage policies.
• SPBM Failover workflow APIs are ran against the replication group and not the storage policy itself.
• Recommendation: Attempt to keep replication groups under 100 VMs. This will assist with the VASA Ops being issued against the policies and replication groups and the time it takes to return these queries.
  • This includes both Snapshot and Replication enabled protection groups. These VASA Ops, such as queryReplicationGroup, will look up all objects in both local replication and snapshot pgroups, as well as target protection groups. The more protection groups and the more objects in protection groups will inherently cause these queries to take longer. Please see Terminology Review for more information.
• Recommendation: Do not change the default storage policy with the vVols Datastore. This could cause issues in the vSphere UI when provisioning to the vVols Datastore.