Storage policy based management and vVols
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VMware vSphere APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) make it easy for a storage administrator to configure datastores with well-defined capabilities and let the VM administrator use those whenever needed to provision VMs without having to interact with each other.
It's worth taking a look at this approach to see how it can streamline your virtualization storage operations and avoid a lot of trivial work.
Prior to VASA, VM administrators could define VM storage policies, but they had to work with the storage administrator to identify appropriate datastores, often by using documentation or naming conventions. With VASA, the storage administrator can define a range of storage capabilities, including performance, tiering, encryption, and replication. A set of capabilities for a volume or a set of volumes is called a storage capability profile (SCP).
The SCP supports minimum and/or maximum QoS for a VM's data vVols. Minimum QoS is supported only on AFF systems. ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere includes a dashboard that displays VM granular performance and logical capacity for vVols on ONTAP systems.
The following figure depicts ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere 9.8 vVols dashboard.
After the storage capability profile is defined, it can be used to provision VMs using the storage policy that identifies its requirements. The mapping between the VM storage policy and the datastore storage capability profile allows vCenter to display a list of compatible datastores for selection. This approach is known as storage policy based management.
VASA provides the technology to query storage and return a set of storage capabilities to vCenter. VASA vendor providers supply the translation between the storage system APIs and constructs and the VMware APIs that are understood by vCenter. NetApp's VASA Provider for ONTAP is offered as part of the ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere appliance VM, and the vCenter plug-in provides the interface to provision and manage vVol datastores, as well as the ability to define storage capability profiles (SCPs).
ONTAP supports both VMFS and NFS vVol datastores. Using vVols with SAN datastores brings some of the benefits of NFS such as VM-level granularity. Here are some best practices to consider, and you can find additional information in TR-4400:
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A vVol datastore can consist of multiple FlexVol volumes on multiple cluster nodes. The simplest approach is a single datastore, even when the volumes have different capabilities. SPBM makes sure that a compatible volume is used for the VM. However, the volumes must all be part of a single ONTAP SVM and accessed using a single protocol. One LIF per node for each protocol is sufficient. Avoid using multiple ONTAP releases within a single vVol datastore because the storage capabilities might vary across releases.
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Use the ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere plug-in to create and manage vVol datastores. In addition to managing the datastore and its profile, it automatically creates a protocol endpoint to access the vVols if needed. If LUNs are used, note that LUN PEs are mapped using LUN IDs 300 and higher. Verify that the ESXi host advanced system setting
Disk.MaxLUNallows a LUN ID number that is higher than 300 (the default is 1,024). Do this step by selecting the ESXi host in vCenter, then the Configure tab, and findDisk.MaxLUNin the list of Advanced System Settings. -
Do not install or migrate VASA Provider, vCenter Server (appliance or Windows based), or ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere itself onto a vVols datastore, because they are then mutually dependent, limiting your ability to manage them in the event of a power outage or other data center disruption.
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Back up the VASA Provider VM regularly. At a minimum, create hourly snapshots of the traditional datastore that contains VASA Provider. For more about protecting and recovering the VASA Provider, see this KB article.
The following figure shows vVols components.
