Creating and managing datastore clusters

vSphere 5 introduced the new concept of a datastore cluster, which is a storage pool of VMFS datastores clustered in a similar way to how vSphere clusters hosts to share compute. Datastore clusters use Storage DRS to manage the pool of storage.

Storage DRS, as it is known, makes recommendations to balance utilization and workload across datastores in the cluster. Using Storage vMotion, a datastore cluster can balance the utilization of datastores so that the virtual machines are less likely to run out of disk space on their VMFS datastores or experience performance issues due to latency. Storage DRS can either make recommendations or can automatically apply recommendations to move a VM from one datastore to another if a datastore runs low on the available disk space. Storage DRS can also move around virtual machines for the initial placement of a VM that requires more disk space than what is available on any single datastore in a datastore cluster...