Dell PowerVault MD3800i - Manual (Page 8)

Profile-Driven And Policy-Based Storage
The VASA provider supports profile-driven storage management by categorizing virtual disks by performance and
reporting performance capability to vCenter. This information can then be used to establish profiles based on specific
application performance requirements. Benefits of this approach include:
• Rapid, intelligent provisioning of applications
• Application service levels that match available storage
• Better visibility into the available storage pool
Policy-based storage management supported in vSphere 5.0 helps you further provision virtual machines (VMs) by
automating datastore placement decisions.
Storage Service-Level Agreements
Using the VASA provider replaces the need to maintain storage capability spreadsheets for each LUN. Instead, you can
deliver the best-matched resources to any service-level agreement (SLA) required by the VM.
The VASA provider allows you to discover and monitor storage array SLA properties based on availability, security and
performance. You can then use VASA to enforce storage VM SLAs and create end-to-end storage SLA guarantees for
each virtual machine.
Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler
The VASA provider extends VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) functionality to data storage by enabling a
Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (SDRS) to operate on a group of datastores with similar capabilities. With the
VASA provider, SDRS can determine whether a storage array can support SDRS migration, as well as whether migration
is recommended.
VASA Session Communications
All communications between the vCenter Server and the VASA provider use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates.
The VASA provider can use a self-signed certificate or a certificate issued by a certificate authority (CA).
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