As our virtual data centers continue to host diverse VM workloads, it becomes important to segregate, isolate, and allocate storage resources in a manner to optimize performance and reliability. To achieve this, the VMs should be placed on the datastores with the characteristics that would aid in smooth functioning of these workloads. Unfortunately, most VMware administrators wouldn't necessarily have the visibility to the underlying storage characteristics, largely due to the fact that in most organizations, a different team manages the storage. A VMware administrator would generally request for a LUN of a particular size, the storage administrator carves a LUN from an available storage pool and presents it to the ESXi host. This would mean that the administrator would only be able to distribute the workloads across multiple datastores based on space utilization.

So, how can the administrator get around this problem? There are two ways: