Supported Storage Types for VMware Cloud Foundation

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.

Special considerations apply if you plan to add clusters to the management domain, for example, to separate additional management components that require specific hardware resources or might impact the performance of the main management components in the default cluster, or, in the case of the consolidated architecture of VMware Cloud Foundation, to separate customer workloads from the management components.

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)	Principal	Principal
VMware vSAN Max™	Not Supported	Not Supported
Cross-cluster capacity sharing (HCI Mesh)	Supplemental	Principal (additional clusters only) Supplemental
VMware vSphere® Virtual Volumes™ (FC, iSCSI, or NFS)	Supplemental	Principal 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
NVMe/TCP	Supplemental	Supplemental
NVMe/FC	Supplemental	Supplemental

Note:

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