Introduction to Virtual SAN Space Efficiency

You can use space efficiency techniques to reduce the amount of space for storing data. These techniques reduce the total storage capacity required to meet your needs.

You can enable deduplication and compression on a Virtual SAN cluster to eliminate duplicate data and reduce the amount of space needed to store data.

You can set the Failure tolerance method policy attribute on VMs to use RAID 5 or RAID 6 erasure coding. Erasure coding can protect your data while using less storage space than the default RAID 1 mirroring.

You can use deduplication and compression, and RAID 5 or RAID 6 erasure coding to increase storage space savings. RAID 5 or RAID 6 provide clearly defined space savings over RAID 1. Deduplication and compression can provide additional savings.