The vSphere API for Storage Awareness (VASA) permits storage arrays to integrate with vCenter for management functionality. VASA providers expose features of the physical storage devices, such as storage health status, configuration info, and storage capacity.

SMS establishes and maintains connections with VASA providers. SMS retrieves information about storage availability from the providers, and clients can use the SMS API to perform the following operations.

Identify VASA providers.
Retrieve information about storage arrays.
Identify vSphere inventory entities (hosts and datastores) which are associated with external storage entities on the storage arrays.

The SMS API uses a SOAP-XML RPC protocol, similar to the vSphere Web Services (VIM) API. It is bundled in the vSphere Management SDK.

The SMS service endpoint is

For more information about using the Storage Monitoring Service, see the following API reference documentation:

vCenter Storage Monitoring Service API 8.0