Provisioning a datastore creates a logical container for your virtual machines and their virtual machine disks (VMDKs). You can provision a datastore, and then attach the datastore to a single host, to all of the hosts in a cluster, or to all of the hosts in a datacenter.
You can also provision a datastore by adding a cluster.
See "Enabling datastore mounting across different subnets" section in VSC 9.6 Deployment and Setup Guide.
This preference file is also applicable to VVol datastore creation. Virtual Storage Console, VASA Provider, and Storage Replication Adapter Deployment and Setup Guide for 9.6 release has more information on preferences file and enabling datastore mounting across different subnets.
The Provision Datastore option enables you to specify a storage capability profile for the datastore. Storage capability profiles help in specifying consistent service level objectives (SLOs) and simplify the provisioning process. You can specify a storage capability profile only if you have enabled VASA Provider. The virtual appliance for VSC, VASA Provider, and SRA supports the following protocols:
VSC can create a datastore on either an NFS volume or a LUN:
If a storage capability profile is not specified during provisioning, you can later use the Storage Mapping page to map a datastore to a storage capability profile.