Storage as a Single Pool

VMstore pools provides grouping of managed VMstores to use for VM Scale-Out, to enable administrators to manage storage resources. It provides recommendations to help balance space usage, flash usage and IO load for the VMstores. Each pool can have its own configuration, affinity and anti-affinity rules used by the VM Scale-Out engine to generate VM migration recommendations. Pool membership is static. The administrator has to add VMstores to a pool for it to be part of that pool. The pool collects and reports aggregated performance and capacity statistics. VMstore pools only work for VMstores running Tintri OS 4.2 or later.

Here are some of their important characteristics:

• VMs are not moved between submounts of different names, or between shares with different names.
• If a VMware datastore is: vmstore-1:/tintri, and another VMware datastore on the same vCenter is: vmstore-1:/tintri/vmware, VMs will not be moved between those two datastores. The pathname of the mount is examined to make this determination.
• Similarly, if a Hyper-V share is: //vmstore-1.example.com/VMs, and another Hyper-V share is: //vmstore-2.example.com/hyperv, the VMs will not be moved between those two shares.

VMstore Pool Recommendations

• Use the same submount or share name for all datastores that are accessed by the same set of hosts.
• Do not use the same submount name if you want to separate multiple tenants within the same VMstore pool. Use a different submount name for each customer.
• Each submount name should be present on at least two different VMstores. It does not need to be present on all VMstores, but the recommendation engine needs some choices for where to move. Submounts with only one occurrence are listed in the Notifications tab on the pool.
• If using VMware SRM, the SRM submount name should ordinarily be different than other submount names.
• This prevents recommendations from causing VMs to cease protection. If two SRM submount have identical protection policies, they can still load balance between them.