Had an interesting occurrence pop up early in the week while we where adding a new Datastore to a vCloud Hosting Zone. We are running vCloud Director 5.1.2 and have implemented two tiers of Datastore Cluster from which the Provider vDCs can consume storage from.

vcloud_ds

We went about adding a new datastore to the SATA Cluster through vCenter without too much worry as per usual. Upon going back into vCloud Director we noticed that the SATA Datastore Cluster had disappeared from the list of datastores…just gone!

After an initial panic we realised that a step had been missed in the provisioning and setup of the new datastore. Because we have Storage Profiles with Storage Capabilities being passed through from vCenter to vCloud any datastore to be consumed by vCloud requires a User-Defined Storage Capability Assigned to it as shown below:

vcloud_ds_2

Once the Policy was applied the Datastore Cluster reappeared in vCloud Director and the panic was over. Not sure if this is by design or a bug, but one to look out for. I’m keen to test this against vCloud Director 5.5 and might look to provide an update once that’s been done in the lab.