Profile-driven storage enables the creation of datastores that provide varying levels of service. With profile-driven storage, you can use storage capabilities and VM storage profiles to ensure that VMs use storage that provides a certain level of capacity, performance, availability, redundancy, and so on.

Profile-driven storage minimizes the amount of storage planning that the administrator must do for each VM. For example, the administrator can use profile-driven storage to create basic storage tiers. Datastores with similar capabilities are tagged to form gold, silver, and bronze tiers. Redundant, high-performance storage might be tagged as the gold tier, and non-redundant, medium performance storage might be tagged as the bronze tier.

It can be used during the provisioning of a VM to ensure that its disks are placed on the storage that is best for its situation. For example, profile-driven storage can help you ensure that the VM running a critical I/O-intensive database is placed in the gold tier. Ideally, an administrator will always want to create the best match of predefined VM storage requirements with the available physical storage properties.