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.

VMware Cloud Foundation supports the following principal and supplemental storage combinations for clean deployments of VMware Cloud Foundation.

Note: For information about the supported storage types for vSphere environments converted or imported into VMware Cloud Foundation, see Converting or Importing Existing vSphere Environments into VMware Cloud Foundationin the VMware Cloud Foundation Administration Guide.
Table 1. Supported Storage Types in VMware Cloud Foundation

Storage Type

Management Domain - Default Cluster

Management Domain - Additional Clusters

VI Workload Domain

vSAN Original Storage Architecture (OSA)

Principal

Principal

Principal

vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA)

Principal

Principal

Principal

VMware vSAN Max™

Not supported

 Principal

Principal

Cross-cluster capacity sharing (HCI Mesh)

Supplemental

  • Principal (additional compute-only clusters)

  • Supplemental

  • Principal (additional compute-only clusters)

  • Supplemental

VMware vSphere® Virtual Volumes™ (FC, iSCSI, or NFS)

Supplemental

 Supplemental

  • Principal

  • Supplemental

VMFS on FC

 Supplemental

Supplemental
  • Principal
  • Supplemental

NFS

 Supplemental (NFS 3 and NFS 4.1)

Supplemental (NFS 3 and NFS 4.1)
  • Principal (NFS 3)
  • Supplemental (NFS 3 and NFS 4.1)

iSCSI

Supplemental

Supplemental

Supplemental
NVMe/TCP Supplemental

Supplemental

 Supplemental
NVMe-FC Supplemental Supplemental Supplemental
NVMe-RDMA Supplemental Supplemental Supplemental
Note:

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