Storage space and service management

After deployment and storage system attachment, the IBM® Spectrum Control Base Edition administrators must define the new virtual entities, resulting in simpler and more flexible storage management.

The virtual storage entities include:

  • Storage service – A combination of assigned storage resources (pools) and user-defined policies (capabilities). The storage resources which are assigned to the service may reside on any storage system, as illustrated below. The policies are additional capabilities, or storage requirements for the service. They are compression, encryption, etc.
  • Storage space – A logical grouping of several storage services. Usually, a single space is assigned to a specific organization (storage tenant).
Figure 1. Storage elements without VVol utilization
This image shows the storage elements utilized in a non-VVol environment.

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
This image shows the storage elements utilized in a VVol environment.

The combination of storage space and service is created by storage administrators to include the required resource capacity and storage capabilities on a matching storage system. Then the space/service combination is used by VMware administrators for volume provisioning instead of physical objects.