Storage design for VMware Cloud Foundation includes the design for principal and supplemental storage.

Principal storage is used during the creation of a workload domain and is capable of running workloads. Supplemental storage can be added after the creation of a workload domain and can be capable of running workloads or be used for data at rest storage such as virtual machine templates, backup data, and ISO images. VMware Cloud Foundation supports the following principal and supplemental storage combinations:

Table 1. Supported Storage Types in VMware Cloud Foundation

Storage Type

Management Domain

VI Workload Domain

vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA)

Principal

Principal

vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA)

Not Supported

Not Supported

vVols (FC, iSCSI, or NFS)

Supplemental

  • Principal

  • Supplemental

HCI Mesh (Remote vSAN Datastores)

Supplemental

  • Principal (additional clusters only)

  • Supplemental

VMFS on FC

Supplemental

  • Principal

  • Supplemental

NFS

Supplemental (NFS 3 and NFS 4.1)

  • Principal (NFS 3)

  • Supplemental (NFS 3 and NFS 4.1)

iSCSI

Supplemental

Supplemental
NVMeoF/TCP Supplemental Supplemental
Note:

For a consolidated VMware Cloud Foundation architecture model, the storage types that are supported for the management domain apply.