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Storage Policies

Create named, reusable storage presets so operators pick a policy at deploy time instead of manually choosing a Storage Backend and pool every time — similar in spirit to vSphere's "VM Storage Policies," scoped down to backend-pinning for this release.

What a policy does

A Storage Policy bundles:

  • Name — e.g. Gold — Ceph HA, Bronze — Local Fast.
  • Backend — Local, ZFS, Ceph, DRBD, or NFS.
  • HA required — an informational flag shown to whoever picks the policy.
  • Default — a cosmetic marker; only one policy can be flagged Default at a time.

At deploy time, picking a policy auto-sets the VM's Storage Backend to whatever the policy pins and locks that field so it can't be changed. You still pick the specific pool, datastore, or volume yourself — a policy answers "which backend," not "which exact pool."

v1 scope

This release is backend-pinning only. It does not yet auto-filter pools/datastores by tag, and it does not yet show a compliance badge on the VM. Every VM deployed under a policy does record that policy's ID internally, so a future release can add compliance display without a schema change.

Creating a policy

  1. Open Datastore Manager → Storage Policies tab.
  2. Fill in the form:
  3. Policy Name — short and descriptive, e.g. Gold — Ceph HA.
  4. Storage Backend — pick the backend this policy should pin.
  5. Description — optional, shown to whoever picks the policy later.
  6. HA required — toggle on for policies meant for shared/HA backends (Ceph, DRBD, NFS).
  7. Make Default — optional; setting this unsets Default on any other policy.
  8. Click Create Policy — it appears immediately in the table below.

Using a policy at deploy time

  1. Open Deploy VM.
  2. In the Storage Policy dropdown, pick a policy instead of -- Custom (manual selection) --.
  3. Storage Backend auto-fills and greys out; the matching pool/datastore/volume picker (Ceph tier, ZFS pool, DRBD volume, or NFS datastore) appears as usual — pick the specific target the same way you would with a manual deploy.
  4. To bypass policies for one deploy, switch back to -- Custom (manual selection) -- — the manual backend picker and any cluster-designated storage steering behave exactly as before this feature existed.

Editing or deleting a policy

Right-click a row (or click ⋯) in the Storage Policies table:

  • Edit… — change any field, including which policy is Default.
  • Delete… — removes the policy. VMs already deployed under it keep running unaffected; they just lose the association.

See also