The physical storage design for RAN uses the ESXi local disk to implement the primary storage type at Cell Site.
Cell Site design for local storage can be internal hard disks located inside your ESXi host. Local storage does not support sharing across multiple hosts. Only one host has access to a datastore on a local storage device. As a result, although you can use local storage to create VMs, you cannot use VMware features that require shared storage, such as HA and vMotion.
ESXi supports various local storage devices, including SCSI, IDE, SATA, SAS, flash, and NVMe devices.
Another option is Network Attached Storage that stores VM files on remote file servers accessed over a standard TCP/IP network. The NFS client built into ESXi uses Network File System (NFS) protocol versions 3 and 4.1 to communicate with the NAS/NFS servers. For network connectivity, the host requires a standard network adapter.
You can mount an NFS volume directly on the ESXi host. You can use the NFS datastore to store and manage VMs in the same way that you use the VMFS datastores.
NFS Storage depicts a VM using the NFS datastore to store its files. In this configuration, the host connects to the NAS server, which stores the virtual disk files, through a regular network adapter.
Although local storage configuration is possible, it is not recommended. Using a single connection between storage devices and the host creates a Single Point of Failure (SPOF) that can cause interruptions when a connection is unreliable or fails. However, because most of the local storage devices do not support multiple connections, you cannot use multiple paths to access the local storage.
