How do you name your VMware datastores? Its an interesting question, how much information do you want to convey? Do you want to give a system administrator some idea of the data protection provided by the underlying storage perhaps? Or some idea of the location?
There’s lots to think about, but also simplicity can be key, having something that needs for a System Administrator to have to look up a set of codes to work out what is going on is probably too complicated. Just calling it datastore1, datastore2 etc. is probably a bit too simple.
A common nomenclature I have used in the past is as follows:
<location>-<tier>-<ID>-<type>-<function>
You may have documentation that details what these are but essentially the goal is that a system administrator can fairly easily determine what the function is of the datastore, it also fit for providing storage to things other than VMware too.
Location = Where is the storage array providing the storage, lets say you have a two sites SiteA and SiteB, you may have a short acronym or site identifier name.
Tier = What performance and/or protection tier is available from the storage. A common one I have used is precious metals Platinum (Synchronously Replicated), Gold (Asynchronously Replicated every 2 hours), Bronze (Asynchronously replicated once per day).
ID = A identifying number, e.g. 01, 02, 03, this also can be helpful if you have multiple arrays providing storage to a single host, to avoid clashes you might use 01, 02, 03 for storage from the first unit, then 101, 102, 103 etc. for storage from the second unit.
Type = Is the storage “standard” is it “encrypted” is it “pinned” (i.e has SSD supporting it) etc. So you might have “s” for standard, “e” for encrypted, “p” for pinned, and of course you can combine into “ep” for Encrypted and Pinned storage.
Function = What is the storage actually for? If its VMware you might put “vm”, if its for a file server “ntfs” or Microsoft SQL or Exchange directly presented to a host or Virtual machine “sql” or “xng” for example.
In the end you might end up with something like:
sitea-gold-03-s-vm
or
siteb-bronze-101-s-vm
Just some possible ways to simply convey what you need.
Image Attribution: CHUTTERSNAP
