After deployment and storage system attachment, the IBM® Spectrum Control Base Edition administrators define the virtual entities, resulting in
simpler and more flexible storage management.
Note: The virtual volume functionality is supported by the IBM XIV® (11.5.1 or later) and storage systems that run IBM Spectrum
Virtualize™ (7.6 or later).
The virtual storage entities include:
Storage service – A combination of assigned storage resources (pools) and
user-defined policies. The storage pools which are assigned to the service may reside on any storage
system, as illustrated below. The policies are additional capabilities, such as compression,
encryption, etc.
Storage space – A group of services. Usually, a single space is assigned to a
specific organization (storage tenant).
Figure 1. Storage elements without VVol utilization
When the use of VMware virtual volumes (VVols) is enabled for a service, it is assigned to a
space which must reside on a single storage system (see drawing below). Such system holds a storage
resource (XIV group pool or child pool on storage systems that
run IBM Spectrum Virtualize) connected to
the service. For XIV storage systems, the storage
resource consists of the following pools:
Thin pool for thin provisioning.
Thick pool for thick provisioning.
Meta pool for holding VM-related management metadata.
Thus, in addition to its set of attributes (compression, encryption, etc), each service receives
a user-defined storage capacity.Figure 2. Storage elements with VVol utilization
