Resolving VMC – Objects with non-compliant storage policies in SDDC

The Issue

Overnight I received an email from the VMware Cloud Services platform regarding a VMC environment I am an administrator of. The opening paragraph was as below:

Please be advised that you have VMs and or objects in your VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC that do not comply with the VMC SLA i.e. they have non-compliant storage policies.

Well, this doesn’t sound good. The email trailed off with a list of affected virtual machines and snapshots.

The Cause

This message is a flag on not following best practices in the VMC environment. VMC implements a Managed Storage Policy Profiles (MSPP) which integrate with vSphere VM Storage Policy management into SDDC Management. Ensuring that any workload not assigned a custom storage policy always complies with the services SLA requirements.

In short, if your VMs are part of the managed storage profile, they are covered by the SLAs provided by VMC, and if there’s an outage, you are eligible for credits.

You do have the ability to create your own custom policies as you require, but any VMs that are configured in these policies are not subject to the SLA.

The email is simply a pointer to say “hey we recommend you move those objects to a storage policy covered by the SLA”.

Below we have the custom policy (in this case just the default VSAN policy) and then the provided managed policy which takes the format of “VMC Workload Storage Policy – <Cluster-Name>”

VSAN default policy

VSAN managed policy

The Fix

If you want to resolve this, then here is a quick PowerCLI script to do that for you.

$custompolicy = <Custom Storage Policy Name>
$managedpolicy = <Managed Cluster Policy Name>

# To target the VMs home configuration
$vms = get-vm * | Get-SpbmEntityConfiguration | where {$_.StoragePolicy -like $custompolicy}

foreach ($VM in $vms) { $VM | Set-SpbmEntityConfiguration -StoragePolicy $managedpolicy}

# To target the hard drives of VMs
$hds = get-vm -location Compute-ResourcePool | get-harddisk | Get-SpbmEntityConfiguration | where {$_.StoragePolicy -like $custompolicy}

foreach ($hd in $hds) { $hd | Set-SpbmEntityConfiguration -StoragePolicy $managedpolicy }

Below we can see now that the VSAN environment is now resyncing the data to the new storage policy requirements.

VSAN Resync Objects

If you’ve any questions or concerns about the changes to the storage policies for your production workloads, then as always, contact VMware Support to discuss first.

Regards

Dean Lewis

 

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