vSphere Storage DRS illustrated

Storage DRS:

Back in 5.0, VMware introduced Storage DRS. If DRS can be considered the automation of vMotion, Storage DRS can then be considered as the automation of Storage vMotion.

In 6x, Storage DRS can be configured with up to 64 datastores, with up to 256 Storage DRS datastore clusters x vCenter. A single Storage DRS cluster has a maximum of 9000 virtual disks.

Default Values:

Manual Mode (default) versus Fully Automated.
80% space utilization triggers Storage vMotion reccomendations.
15ms latency values trigger reccommendations
5 minute intervals used by default to check space utilization (Can't be modified).
8 hour intervals used by default to check latency results (Can be modified).

New Features in 6.0:

1. vSphere Replication integration.
2. Site Recovery Manager integration.
3. Virtual Machine Storage Policy integration.
4. VASA integration.

Great Information about the new features found in these links:

http://cormachogan.com/2015/02/05/vsphere-6-0-storage-features-part-2-storage-drs-and-sioc/

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2015/02/09/what-is-new-for-storage-drs-in-vsphere-6-0/

Configuration Steps:

1. Go to the Storage View and create a few vmfs datastores. This also works with nfs. VMFS and NFS cannot be combined. 4 identical datastores were created in this example. They were called d1, d2, d3 and d4. All were 10gbs.

2. Right Click on the Datacenter and create a datastore cluster.

3. Take a look at the settings. All four datastores are currently empty. Notice that there are no reccomendations at this time.

4. Create a couple of vms, by default they will be placed in different datastores to balance space. Notice that they were placed in d3 and d4.

5. Storage vMotion one of the vms so that they both reside on the same datastore. If combined they exceed 80% utilization, an alarm will be triggered and a reccomendation will appear.

6. If Automation is changed to Fully Automated, the vCenter will automatically migrate one of the vms to balance space utilization and the reccomendation will vanish.