6.5.1

You can assign the Virtual Volumes storage policy during an initial deployment of a virtual machine, or
when performing other virtual machine operations, such as cloning or migrating. This topic describes how
to assign the Virtual Volumes storage policy when you create a new virtual machine. For information
about other VM provisioning methods, see the vSphere Virtual Machine Administration documentation.
You can apply the same storage policy to the virtual machine configuration file and all its virtual disks. If
storage requirements for your virtual disks and the configuration file are different, you can associate
different storage policies with the VM configuration file and the selected virtual disks.
Procedure
1 In the vSphere Web Client, start the virtual machine provisioning process and follow appropriate
steps.
2 Assign the same storage policy to all virtual machine files and disks.
a On the Select Storage page, select the storage policy compatible with Virtual Volumes, for
example VVols Silver, from the VM Storage Policy drop-down menu.
b Select the Virtual Volumes datastore from the list of available datastores.
c If you use the replication service with Virtual Volumes, specify the replication group.
Replication groups indicate which VMs and virtual disks must be replicated together to a target
site.
Option Description
Preconfigured replication group Replication groups that are configured in advance on the storage side.
vCenter Server and ESXi discover the replication groups, but do not manage
their life cycle.
Automatic replication group Virtual Volumes creates a replication group and assigns all VM objects to this
group.
The datastore becomes the destination storage resource for the virtual machine configuration file and
all virtual disks.
3 Change the storage policy for the virtual disk.
Use this option if requirements for storage placement are different for virtual disks.
a On the Customize Hardware page, expand the New hard disk pane.
b From the VM storage policy drop-down menu, select the appropriate storage policy, for example
VVols Gold, that you want to assign to the virtual disk.
c For replication, specify or modify the replication group. If you use the automatic replication group
for the virtual machine, you cannot change it to the preconfigured group for the virtual disk.
4 Complete the virtual machine provisioning process.
After you create the virtual machine, the Summary tab displays the assigned storage policies and their
compliance status.
vSphere Storage
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