I recently had to rebuild one of my lab environments that consisted of a vCenter Server and several ESXi hosts and one of the capabilities I required was VM Storage Profiles. In a brand new vSphere environment, VM Storage Profiles is disabled by default, presumably due to licensing as this feature is not available in every SKU. To enable VM Storage Profiles, you will need to connect to your vCenter Server using either the vSphere Web Client or the legacy vSphere C# Client as seen in the screenshot below.

Another way of enabling the VM Storage Profiles feature is through an automated fashion using the vSphere APIs where this functionality is exposed.

Note: To manage and consume VM Storage Profiles, you will still need to use the vSphere Web Client or vSphere C# Client as the APIs for this functionality is not yet available.

VM Storage Profiles is enabled on a per vSphere Cluster basis and there is a boolean property called spbmEnabled which determines whether this feature is enabled or disabled. To update this property, you will need to use the ReconfigureComputeResource_Task method.

Here is are two examples of implementing the API both in a PowerCLI script as well as a vSphere SDK for Perl script:

PowerCLI:

In my lab environment, I have a vSphere Cluster called "Cluster" and you can use PowerCLI to check whether VM Storage Profiles is enabled or not by running this command (replace Cluster with the name of your vSphere Cluster):

(Get-Cluster -Name Cluster).extensionData.ConfigurationEx.SpbmEnabled

To enable VM Storage Profiles, you can then call the Enable-StorageProfile function along with the name of the vSphere Cluster which is just called "Cluster":

 

vSphere SDK for Perl:

To enable VM Storage Profiles using the vSphere SDK for Perl, I wrote a quick script called storageProfileMgmt.pl which allows you to query whether a vSphere Cluster has VM Storage Profiles as well as enabling and disabling the feature. Here is a screenshot demonstrating how the script works: