Home > Storage > PowerStore > Virtualization and Cloud > Dell PowerStore: VMware vSphere with Tanzu and TKG Clusters > VM Storage Policies
VM Storage Policies are typically associated with traditional virtual machine workloads. VM Storage Policies are used to tie application storage requirements to underlying block, NFS, or vVol storage capabilities advertised through tags or the VASA provider respectively. In the context of vSphere with Tanzu, VM Storage Policies are used for the same purpose – to tie workload requirements to capable underlying storage. However, in the case of vSphere with Tanzu, workloads are not traditional VMs. Instead, they are Supervisor Control Plane Nodes, Ephemeral Disks, Image Cache, and Persistent Volumes.
In addition, VM Storage Policies are closely related to Kubernetes storage classes. When a VM Storage Policy is created and assigned for use in vSphere with Tanzu, vSphere with Tanzu creates a matching Kubernetes storage class in the Supervisor Namespace. These storage classes will also be replicated to any VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Cluster that is deployed.
Creating a VM Storage Policy is the final configuration needed before vSphere with Tanzu can be deployed and examples will be provided in the following sections.
Note: VMware is flexible with the characters allowed in VM Storage Policy names. However, storage class names are restrictive. For example, spaces and upper-case characters are not allowed in storage class names. Since VM Storage Policies names become storage class names in vSphere with Tanzu and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid Clusters, illegal characters used in a VM Storage Policy name must be resolved. VMware handles this automatically by replacing spaces with the ‘-‘character and converting upper-case characters to lower-case characters. As a best practice, do not use spaces and upper-case characters in VM Storage Policy names. Use a naming convention compliant with storage class names.
To create a VM Storage Policy for block or NFS storage on PowerStore, follow these steps:
To create a VM Storage Policy for vVol storage on PowerStore, follow these steps: