Provisioning storage with the IBM Spectrum Control GUI

You can provision volumes or shares to servers, hypervisors, and clusters in IBM Spectrum Control.

Before you begin

Discontinued support: Provisioning is no longer supported in IBM Spectrum Control. While the feature might still work in this release, it's recommended that you use another tool for your provisioning needs, when possible. For a complete list of discontinued features, see Discontinued features in IBM Spectrum Control.
The prerequisites for provisioning storage are as follows:
  • You must have the required license. Actions that are available based on role
  • You must have Administrator privileges or permission to use one or more of the service classes that are created for block-storage or file-service provisioning.
  • You must add and probe block-storage or file-storage resources, or both.
The following restrictions apply to volume provisioning:
  • If the service class that is associated with the provisioning request requires multipathing or if automatic zoning is enabled, the fabrics and switches must be managed by IBM Spectrum Control. If the fabric is not managed by IBM Spectrum Control, the fabric-related configuration options are ignored when the provisioning task is executed.
  • If you provision volumes to physical servers and servers that are virtual machines, you must create separate provisioning tasks using the GUI.
  • If you provision multiple servers with storage volumes, the servers must all run on the same operating system. If the servers are virtual machines, the hypervisors that manage the servers must all run on the same operating system.
  • If the provisioning request involves assigning multiple volumes to a resource, the volumes are sourced from pools in the same storage system.

NAS file shares can be provisioned only from Storwize V7000 Unified storage systems.

About this task

Specify the capacity that is required and the service class that you want to associate with the provisioning task. For shares, you must also specify at least one file access protocol. IBM Spectrum Control identifies the storage resources that can provide the storage capacity and that meet the criteria that are specified for the service class. From the set of storage resources that can provide the capacity and service class, IBM Spectrum Control identifies the best location for the storage and creates a provisioning task. Depending on the privileges that are associated with your role, you can save, execute, or schedule the provisioning task.