A vSphere storage profile defines storage policy information that describes storage requirements for virtual machines and storage capabilities of storage providers. You use the VMware Storage Policy API to manage the association between virtual machines and datastores.

With appropriate policies, SPBM governs virtual machine placement into appropriate datastore, accounting for RAID levels, pre-zeroed allocated disk, and space efficient thin provisioned disk. Storage policies may also request specific data services for virtual disks, such as caching, replication, and deduplication.

The Storage Policy API supports the following capabilities:

Access to vSphere storage profiles and to entities associated with profiles
Compliance checking of profiles and entities
Placement compatibility checking

The Storage Policy API uses a SOAP-XML RPC protocol, similar to the vSphere Web Services (VIM) API. It is bundled in the vSphere Management SDK. The Management SDK provides RPC stubs for clients with Java language bindings.

The Storage Policy service endpoint is

https://{domain}/pbm

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

VMware Storage Policy API 8.0