When you stand up a new cluster you may have storage requirements besides just the default vSAN storage policy. Since the screens have change slightly 🙂 between 6.5 and 6.7 update 3 I thought I would take a moment for a high level walk through of creating a new storage policy.
Go to Menu > Policies and Profiles
VM Storage Policies > Create VM Storage Policy
Give it a name – my method is to name it for what the policy will do
Every environment is different so shape it to what best fits your environment.
I am leaving site disaster tolerance to none – standard cluster because this policy won’t be used for stretch clusters or nested fault domains
Since my example is a Raid-5 with 1 failure I have selected 1 failure – RAID-5 (Erasure Coding)
Under Advanced Policy Rules I am leaving everything default because I selected Thin provisioning and Disk Stripe to 1
However, if I wanted to thick provision this policy due to say a vendor requirement then I would change Object space reservation to Thick provisioning
If I wanted to spread the objects across more capacity drives for increase performance I could change the number of disk stripes per object to 2 or more
I am not adding TAG rule for my example but these can be very useful.
Next shows the compatible storage in your environment based on your selections.
Example: if I had only 3 hosts contributing storage to my vSAN datastore then no datastores would appear as compliant storage because R5 erasure coding requires a four host minimum.
Click finish and the new policy will be generated
Summary:
As you can see from the above creating a new storage policy has become less complex and more wizard driven. I do enjoy the cleaner interface. I hope this helps anyone trying to create a new policy to fit the workload you intend to support. As always, I hope y’all found this article useful.