It is one of the new features of vSphere 5, It is a pool of datastores that will help us to manage the datastores together, always obtaining the best result to locate a virtual machine and thus have a higher performance at the disk level since it will always offer us recommendations to choose the lightest datastore. It will also analyze and generate recommendations for moving virtual machines between the different datastores in the cluster.

Desde la vista de Inventario > Datastores & Datastore Clusters, lo crearemos en el Datacenter con botón derecho “New Datastore Cluster..”

Indicamos el nombre al clúster de datastores, habilitamos por supuesto Storage DRS para que nos mueva las MVs & “Next”,

Seleccionaremos el método de respuesta para las recomendaciones que haga vCenter, being “No Automation (Manual Mode)” para la responder manualmente y “Fully Automated” para que el propio vCenter migre las MVs de forma totalmente automatizada,

Habilitaremos “Enable I/O metric for SDRS recommendations” si queremos que las medidas de I/O contabilizen para las recomendaciones SDRS. Por defecto los umbrales para las recomendaciones de espacio utilizado en cada datastore es para el 80%, y la latencia I/O será de 15ms.

In the advanced options, we will define the minimums to apply for generating recommendations, if there is a minimum difference of at least one 5% of difference between the destination it will not move, or the method of aggressiveness regarding the difference in IO points between the different destinations.

We will select the hosts and/or clusters to which we will add to the datastore cluster. “Next”,

We will select the datastores we want to add to the cluster,

We confirm the summary of the new Datastore Cluster & Finish, with this we will have the cluster created.

On the datastore cluster, we will have the typical tabs where we will see a summary of its configuration, the virtual machines that are stored in it, the hosts and datastores that are members of the cluster, in Storage DRS we will be able to see any recommendations we might have so we can apply them if we have a manual configuration, or if we need to modify the configured options.

When we create a new virtual machine, when selecting the location for the disk we can choose the individual datastores or we will directly see the datastore cluster as a storage option.

At the end of the wizard we will check “Show all storage recommendations” to view possible vCenter recommendations for storing the VM in one datastore or another based on its score.

Aplicaremos las recomendaciones si estamos de acuerdo y con esto vSphere siempre seleccionará la mejor ubicación para las máquinas virtuales dependiendo del uso de nuestros datastores.