Manage Datastore Service Levels with Datastore Tiers

In private cloud, to group hypervisor datastores and price them according to service levels, use datastore tiers. 

• When you use tiers, administrators or cloud users can choose the service level for VM hard disks at the level of VM templates, virtual datacenters, and VMs. 
• When you perform VM or storage moves outside of Abiquo, the platform will synchronize disks to their new datastore tiers.
• If you do not enable datastore tiers feature, all datastore disks will be created in the "Default Tier".

You can add datastores to a tier when you add a hypervisor to the platform, or from the Datastore tiers tab.

• You can only add datastores to datastore tiers if they do not have any managed VM disks on them or if none of the disks are in a tier.

To restrict the use of datastore tiers, you can make them:

• Not allowed: an enterprise cannot use a tier that is not allowed, and they cannot create disks in this tier.
• Disabled: the administrator can disable a tier, for example, for maintenance, migration, or administrative reasons.

In widgets on the Dashboard, the platform will display tiers that are allowed, and tiers that are disabled.

To display datastore tiers for hypervisor storage service levels:

1. Go to Infrastructure → Private → select a datacenter → Servers view → Datastore tiers

To manage the datastores of the hypervisor in tiers: 

 1. Go to Servers and edit the hypervisor

To display a list of enterprises with access to a datastore tier, edit the tier and go to Enterprise access.

When you deploy VMs, the platform will copy VM templates to the hypervisor datastore and you can also create hard disks and allow users to create hard disks on the hypervisor datastores.

To create a datastore tier:

1. Go to Infrastructure → Private → select datacenter → Datastore tiers
2. Click the + Add button
3. Enter the Name and Description
4. Optionally select an Abstract datastore tier to add the tier to a group to control storage service levels for tenants in more than one datacenter. See Abstract datastore tiers for storage service levels
5. Click Save
   

The platform will create the tier and allow access to all future enterprises that you create. 

When you create a datastore tier, by default the platform will allow access to the current enterprise only.

To allow access to different service levels you can set access for these levels:

• all enterprises
• enterprises in a datacenter

To modify enterprise access for ALL enterprises, Infrastructure → Private → select Datacenter → Datastore tiers → create or edit datastore tier → Enterprise access

To display a list of enterprises that currently have access to a datastore tier:

1. Go to Infrastructure → Private → select Datacenter → Datastore tiers → edit datastore tier → Enterprise access
2. Click Cancel or select Do not change enterprise access

You can control access to datastore service levels with datastore tiers. 

To allow or prohibit access to a datastore tier for an individual enterprise

1. Go to Users → edit enterprise → Datacenters → edit allowed datacenter → Datastore tiers
2. Drag datastore tiers to the Allowed or Prohibited lists for this enterprise
3. Click Accept to save the Enterprise datacenter resources

You can also set limits for the tenant for the datastore tiers within each datacenter. See Configure an Enterprise in a Cloud Location#Setallocationlimitsforatenantinadatacenterorregion

You can edit a datastore tier and select multiple hypervisor datastores to add them to this service level.

To add multiple datastores to a tier:

1. Go to Infrastructure → Private → select datacenter → Datastore tiers 
2. Select a datastore tier
3. Click the + add button in the Datastores pane on the right
   

4. From the popup list, select the Datastores to add

5. Click Add
   

You can also add datastore tiers to services levels when you create or edit a hypervisor. See Compute in Datacenters

The administrator can recommend datastore tiers for VM templates, as well as hardware profiles.

To recommend datastore tiers:

1. Go to Apps library → Templates → edit a template
2. Go to the Recommended tab, which lists the datastore tiers that are available in the datacenter.
3. Optional: to display datastore tiers as Recommended for this template, select them from the list
4. Optional: to restrict the user to the selected hardware profiles and datastore tiers, select the Enable only recommended DS Tiers checkbox.

When the user creates a VM, the platform will display the tiers that are available to the user's enterprise and recommended for the template. If you select the option to Enable only recommended DS Tiers, then the user can only select from the recommended tiers. See Create a virtual machine. If there are no tiers available, the user will not be able to create a VM.

For a VM, if a user does not configure a datastore tier, the platform will select a default tier, if any is set.

The platform selects a default tier in the following priority order from highest to lowest:

1. template disk
2. virtual datacenter
3. datacenter
4. any of the allowed tiers
5. null

A null tier means that datastore tiers are not in use.

When the user deploys, if the selected tier cannot be used, the deploy will fail with a scheduler error.

To set the default tier for the datacenter

1. Go to Infrastructure → Private → select datacenter → Datastore tiers
2. Edit the tier and go to General information
3. Select the Default option
4. Click Save

You can set the default service level when you add or edit an existing template disk.

To set the default datastore tier for a template disk

1. Go to Apps library → Private → select datacenter
2. Edit the template
3. Go to Disks → edit disk 
4. Select a Datastore tier to set as the default
   
5. Click Save

On the Disks tab, the platform displays the default tier for each disk.

To set a default datastore tier for the virtual datacenter: 

1. Go to Virtual datacenters → Create or edit a virtual datacenter → Defaults 
2. Select an appropriate Default datastore tier

To set the storage service level for a specific hard disk, assign a datastore tier. 

When you create a VM from a standard VM template, the template may have a recommended tier or the disks may have a default datastore tier set by the administrator. The administrator may enforce the use of a recommended tier. 

• To remove the current service level, click the x symbol beside the Datastore tier name 
  

• To optionally set a new service level, select another tier from the list. 
• If you do not select a tier, the platform will use the defaults