vSphere 5 introduced the so-called Profile Driven Storage. This approach allows reducing the administration time required for VM deployment. Instead of manually selecting the correct datastore for new VMs and reviewing periodically if VMs are still placed correctly, Profile Driven Storage automates this.

With the profile driven approach, datastores are labelled according to their characteristics and capabilities. These labels are called datastore policies. Policies can be based on storage-defined capabilities, which are available when storage supports vSphere APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA). These are vendor-defined characteristics, which may differ depending on the storage used.

Storage policies can also be based on user-defined capabilities, which is accomplished with tags. Tags are custom labels that can be assigned to many different objects in vSphere, including datastores and datastore clusters. More details about tags can be found in the...