I have a vSphere 5.1 cluster that hosts virtual machines for various QA and Development application environments. I am trying to accomplish the following:
- Each VM will have at least three VMDK's - one for the Windows OS, one for data files, and one for Windows page file. These will be stored on separate datastores which correspond to a NetApp volume/LUN on the back-end (mainly for deduplication and for eliminating OS pagefile from snapshot backups, per NetApp recommendatation).
- QA and Development are to be located on different storage systems (meaning it is necessary for OS disks for QA servers be on separate datastores from OS disks for Development servers, for example)
- Use a single Windows 2008 R2 VM template for deployment
- Use Storage Profiles and Storage DRS to automate the initial placement of VMDK files and ongoing optimization.
I am not sure of whether there is a way to fully automate the initial placement of the VMDK files when deploying from a template in a way that meets my requirements, but maybe I'm missing something.
- I created a "storage capability" of Windows OS Disk, one for Windows Data Disk, and one for Windows Page File. I attached each these to a storage profile.
- I created datastore clusters for QA - OS, QA - Data, QA - Pagefile, DEV - OS, DEV - Data, and DEV - Pagefile
- I changed the configuration file for the VM on which the template is based, so that the OS vmdk and the VM Configuration files use the storage profile for OS, the Data vmdk uses the storage profile for Data, and the Pagefile vmdk uses the storage profile for Pagefile.
When I deploy a VM from this template, it wants to apply the OS Disk storage profile to all VMDK's. I can enter advanced settings and manually set the destination Datastore Cluster for each VMDK, but that defeats the purpose of trying to automate initial placement of the VMDK's.
I don't see a way to really automate the initial VMDK placement from template when multiple storage capabilities are assoicated with the same VM.
Am I missing something?