vSphere lets you virtualize disk volumes and file systems so that you can manage and configure storage without having to consider where the data is physically stored.

Fibre Channel SAN arrays, iSCSI SAN arrays, and NAS arrays are widely used storage technologies supported by vSphere to meet different data center storage needs. The storage arrays are connected to and shared between groups of servers through storage area networks. This arrangement allows aggregation of the storage resources and provides more flexibility in provisioning them to virtual machines.

Instead of external arrays, you can use vSAN, which virtualizes the local physical solid-state disks and hard disk drives available on ESXi hosts into a single datastore shared by all hosts in a cluster. vSAN provides high-performance storage with policy-based management, so that you specify only one datastore when creating a desktop pool, and the various components, such as virtual machine files, replicas, user data, and operating system files, are placed on the appropriate solid-state drive (SSD) disks or direct-attached hard disks (HDDs).

vSAN also lets you manage virtual machine storage and performance by using storage policy profiles. If the policy becomes noncompliant because of a host, disk, or network failure, or workload changes, vSAN reconfigures the data of the affected virtual machines and optimizes the use of resources across the cluster.

Note: vSAN is compatible with the View storage accelerator feature but not with the space-efficient disk format feature, which reclaims disk space by wiping and shrinking disks.

With vSphere, you can optionally use Virtual Volumes (vVols). This feature maps virtual disks and their derivatives, clones, snapshots, and replicas, directly to objects, called virtual volumes, on a storage system. This mapping allows vSphere to offload intensive storage operations such as snapshotting, cloning, and replication to the storage system.

Virtual Volumes also lets you manage virtual machine storage and performance by using storage policy profiles in vSphere. These storage policy profiles dictate storage services on a per-virtual-machine basis. This type of granular provisioning increases capacity utilization.

Note: Virtual Volumes is compatible with the View storage accelerator feature but not with the space reclamation feature.
Note: Instant clones do not support Virtual Volumes.