It seems to be a regularly question, and with most recent releases things have changed once again, so I figured I would rewrite my post and point from the original to this update. So what is the question? When you create an SPBM policy you will see a screen which seem to indicate that certain data services can be enabled on a per VM basis. Those data services would be Encryption, Compression, Deduplication, and Hybrid or All-Flash. This is not the case of course, the Storage Rules section was intended to specify which storage services needed to be enabled (or disabled) for a particular datastore to show up as compatible with the policy.
Now with 9.1 various things have changed, and I want to call this out. First of all, when you have Auto-RAID enabled for the policy you don’t even see all the options any longer.
Now, when you disable Auto-RAID the below is what it looks like.
Confusingly, this seems to indicate that these options were only here for disabling/enabling dataservices, however we now that this is not the case. So let’s clarify what these do and which version does what, as I am mildly confused as well at this point. I created a table which hopefully helps explaining how this works and what does what?!
| Version | Service | Rule | Function |
|---|---|---|---|
| All versions (OSA and ESA) | Encryption | Data-At-Rest | Will only present datastores which have data-at-rest-encryption enabled |
| All versions (OSA and ESA) | Encryption | No encryption | Will only present datastores which have data-at-rest-encryption disabled |
| All versions (OSA and ESA) | Encryption | No preference | Will present datastores with or without data-at-rest encryption enabled |
| All versions (OSA) | Storage tier | All flash | Will only present datastores which are All-Flash |
| All versions (OSA) | Storage tier | Hybrid | Will only present datastores which are Hybrid |
| All versions (OSA) | Storage tier | No preference | Will present datastores that are All-Flash or Hybrid |
| All versions (OSA and ESA) | Data Reduction | Deduplication and compression | Will only present datastores which have deduplication and compression enabled |
| All versions (OSA and ESA) | Data Reduction | Compression only | Will only present datastores which have compression enabled |
| vSAN 9.1 and later (ESA) | Data Reduction | No data reduction | Will only present datastores which have compression disabled, it will not disable compression or deduplication! |
| Pre vSAN 9.1 (ESA) | Data Reduction | No data reduction | Disables Compression on all objects associated with the policy |
| All versions (OSA) | Data Reduction | No data reduction | Will only present datastores which have compression disabled, it will not disable compression or deduplication! |
| All versions (OSA and ESA) | Data Reduction | All versions (OSA and ESA) | Will present datastores with or without deduplication and compression enabled |