System Center 2016 Virtual Machine Manager Cookbook（Third Edition）

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Storage providers – SMI-S and SMP

VMM provides support for both Block level storage (Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) connections) and File storage (on SMB 3.0 network shares, residing on a Windows file server or on a NAS device).

By using storage providers, VMM enables discovery, provisioning, classification, allocation, and decommissioning.

Storage classifications enable you to assign user-defined storage classifications to discovered storage pools for Quality of Service (QoS) or chargeback purposes.

You can, for example, assign a classification of Gold to storage pools that have the highest performance and availability, Silver for high performance, and Bronze for low performance.

In order to use this feature, you will need the SMI-S provider.

VMM 2016 can discover and communicate with SAN arrays through the Storage Management Initiative (SMI-S provider) and Storage Management Provider (SMP) provider.

If your storage is SMI-S compatible, you must install the storage provider on a separately available server (do not install on the VMM management server) and then add the provider to VMM management. Some devices come with built-in SMI-S provider and no extra are tasks required in that case. If your storage is SMP-compatible, it does not require a provider installation either.

Each vendor has its own SMI-S setup process. My recommendation is to contact the storage vendor to ask for a Storage provider compatible with VMM 2016. A list of oficially supported storage arrays is available here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/system-center/vmm/supported-arrays.

CIM-XML is used by VMM to communicate with the underlying SMI-S providers since VMM never communicates with the SAN arrays themselves.

By using the storage provider to integrate with the storage, VMM can create LUNs (both GPT and MBR) and assign storage to hosts or clusters.

VMM 2016 also supports the SAN snapshot and clone feature, allowing you to duplicate a LUN through a SAN Copy-capable template to provide for new VMs, if you are hosting those in a Hyper-V platform. You will need to provision outside of VMM for any other VMs hosted with VMware hosts, for example.