Fusion preset: VMFS datastore volumes for VMware ESXi clusters (with two-tier snapshots and QoS)

Hi all,

I put together a Fusion preset for one of the most common block use cases in our environment: provisioning VMFS datastore volumes for a VMware ESXi cluster.

What it does:

- 4x 4 TiB datastore volumes on a FlashArray//X storage class (adjust count/size to your cluster design)

- Two-tier snapshot retention: hourly snapshots kept for 1 day (fast rollback) plus daily snapshots kept for 30 days

- Per-volume QoS limit (50k IOPS / 1 GiB/s) so a single datastore cannot starve the array

- An "environment" parameter (prod/test/dev) that is requested at deployment time and written into the workload tags for filtering and chargeback

The JSON follows the conventions of the official PureStorage-OpenConnect/fusion-presets repository, including the _comment documentation style. One honest note is included in the preset itself: array-side

snapshots of VMFS datastores are crash-consistent, not VM-consistent, so treat them as an extra safety net next to your backup solution.

GitHub link: https://github.com/knabespecht/pure_workflows/blob/main/presets/vmware-esxi-datastores.json

Feedback welcome, especially on the QoS defaults and retention values you use for similar setups.