A developer is deploying pods with Persistent Volumes (PV) on vSphere with Tanzu.

This is because according to VMware documentation34, vSphere with Tanzu uses storage policies to integrate with shared datastores available in your environment, including VMFS, NFS, vSAN, or vVols datastores. The storage policies represent datastores and manage the storage placement of such objects as persistent volumes (PVs). Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) is a framework that provides a single unified control plane across different types of datastores and enables administrators to define policies based on storage capabilities and requirements5.

The Cloud Native Storage for vSphere with Tanzu workflow is as follows: 1. A developer deploys a pod using the kubectl CLI. 2. The vSphere with Tanzu Cloud Native Storage-Container Storage Interface (CNS-CSI) reads this request from the control plane API server. 3. CNS-CSI informs the vCenter Server CNS that a disk with gold storage class is required. 4. CNS interfaces with SPBM for a suitable datastore that satisfies the gold storage class (storage policy). 5. SPBM decides on a suitable datastore and interfaces with DRS for a suitable ESXi host. 6. Hostd on the ESXi host creates a first class disk (VMDK) on the datastore. 7. Spherelet on the ESXi host takes the VMDK. 8. Spherelet mounts the VMDK to the vSphere pod. 9. Spherelet reports the mount as a successful event to the control plane API server.