VMware Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM)

IBM® Spectrum Control Base Edition uses VMware vSphere Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) technology for optimizing the virtual machine provisioning process.

Delivering only one service level, the traditional storage provisioning models fail to match storage consumer needs with storage provider capabilities. This results in misalignment between the system capacities and application requirements, leading to over-provisioning and waste of IT resources.

The SPBM approach allows dynamic definition of storage policies with their subsequent delivery on a per-VM basis. In this case, the storage consumer can pair an application with existing storage policies and provision storage resources exactly according to application requirements. Storage policies, referred to as storage services in this user guide, combine storage capacity with a set of attributes (encryption, provisioning type, etc.) to define storage spaces, which are used as virtual datastores to suit requirements of a specific VM, as illustrated below.