This topic summarizes characteristics that apply to Virtual SAN, as well as its clusters and datastores.
Virtual SAN provides numerous benefits to your environment.
| Supported Features | Description |
|---|---|
| Shared storage support | Virtual SAN supports VMware features that require shared storage, such as HA, vMotion, and DRS. For example, if a host becomes overloaded, DRS can migrate virtual machines to other hosts in the cluster. |
| Just a Bunch Of Disks (JBOD) | Virtual SAN supports JBOD for use in a blade server environment. If your cluster contains blade servers, you can extend the capacity of the datastore with JBOD storage that is connected to the blade servers. |
| On-disk format | Virtual SAN 6.6 supports on-disk virtual file format 5.0, that provides highly scalable snapshot and clone management support per Virtual SAN cluster. For information about the number of virtual machine snapshots and clones supported per Virtual SAN cluster, see the Configuration Maximums documentation. |
| All-flash and hybrid configurations | Virtual SAN can be configured for all-flash or hybrid cluster. |
| Fault domains | Virtual SAN supports configuring fault domains to protect hosts from rack or chassis failure when the Virtual SAN cluster spans across multiple racks or blade server chassis in a data center. |
| Stretched cluster | Virtual SAN supports stretched clusters that span across two geographic locations. |
| Virtual SAN health service | Virtual SAN health service includes preconfigured health check tests to monitor, troubleshoot, diagnose the cause of cluster component problems, and identify any potential risk. |
| Virtual SAN performance service | Virtual SAN performance service includes statistical charts used to monitor IOPS, throughput, latency, and congestion. You can monitor performance of a Virtual SAN cluster, host, disk group, disk, and VMs. |
| Integration with vSphere storage features | Virtual SAN integrates with vSphere data management features traditionally used with VMFS and NFS storage. These features include snapshots, linked clones, vSphere Replication, and vSphere APIs for Data Protection. |
| Virtual Machine Storage Policies | Virtual SAN works with VM storage policies to support a VM-centric approach to storage management. If you do not assign a storage policy to the virtual machine during deployment, the Virtual SAN Default Storage Policy is automatically assigned to the VM. |
| Rapid provisioning | Virtual SAN enables rapid provisioning of storage in the vCenter Server® during virtual machine creation and deployment operations. |
