A method, apparatus, and computer instructions are provided for storage provisioning automation in a data center. A storage manager is provided in the present invention to facilitate end-to-end deployment of storage resources for a server in the data center. The storage manager includes functionalities of a volume manager, file system, and physical volumes. In addition, a hierarchical structure is provided by the present invention to specify configuration data for a volume container. The hierarchical structure includes volume container settings, which includes physical volume settings and logical volume settings linked through data partition settings. For SAN volumes, storage multipath settings and data path settings are included in the structure. File system settings and mounting settings are also included to mount a file system once it is created.