User manual

Storage in vCloud Air 8
vCloud Air lets you direct storage for your virtual machines to either higher performance or lower cost
storage tiers.
You can allocate virtual machine storage when creating virtual data centers and virtual machines or by
adjusting their storage after you create them.
NOTE While the total subscribed storage can be fully allocated to one or more Virtual Data Centers, some
storage is reserved for operational overhead, including swap files and catalogs. This prevents you from fully
provisioning the storage allocation to virtual machines. For further information, please review this
Knowledge Base article:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?
language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2043173.
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To allocate storage to a specific tier when creating a virtual machine using a template, see “Add a
Virtual Machine from a Template,” on page 22.
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To allocate storage to a specific tier when creating a virtual machine from scratch, see “Create a Virtual
Machine Without Using a Template,” on page 33.
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To allocate storage from a specific tier to a virtual data center when creating the virtual data center, see
“Create a Virtual Data Center,” on page 12.
When users create virtual machines in the virtual data center, they can add can disks from the
designated storage tiers based on the amounts allocated for the tiers.
This chapter includes the following topics:
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“Overview of Storage Tiers,” on page 49
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“Adjust Storage for a Virtual Data Center,” on page 53
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“Adjust Storage for a Virtual Machine,” on page 54
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“Migrate Storage for a Virtual Machine to a Different Tier,” on page 55
Overview of Storage Tiers
Tiered storage is the assignment of different categories of data to different types of storage media in order to
reduce total storage cost. vCloud Air offers two storage tiers for virtual machines.
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Standard Storage
VMware, Inc.
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