This topic summarizes characteristics that apply to vSAN, its clusters, and datastores.
vSAN provides numerous benefits to your environment.
| Supported Features | Description |
|---|---|
| Shared storage support | vSAN 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) | vSAN 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 | vSAN 6.7 supports on-disk virtual file format 6.0, that provides highly scalable snapshot and clone management support per vSAN cluster. For information about the number of virtual machine snapshots and clones supported per vSAN cluster, see the Configuration Maximums documentation. |
| All-flash and hybrid configurations | vSAN can be configured for all-flash or hybrid cluster. |
| Fault domains | vSAN supports configuring fault domains to protect hosts from rack or chassis failures when the vSAN cluster spans across multiple racks or blade server chassis in a data center. |
| iSCSI target service | vSAN iSCSI target service enables hosts and physical workloads that reside outside the vSAN cluster to access the vSAN datastore. |
| Stretched cluster | vSAN supports stretched clusters that span across two geographic locations. |
| vSAN health service | vSAN health service includes preconfigured health check tests to monitor, troubleshoot, diagnose the cause of cluster component problems, and identify any potential risk. |
| vSAN performance service | vSAN performance service includes statistical charts used to monitor IOPS, throughput, latency, and congestion. You can monitor performance of a vSAN cluster, host, disk group, disk, and VMs. |
| Integration with vSphere storage features | vSAN 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 | vSAN 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 vSAN Default Storage Policy is automatically assigned to the VM. |
| Rapid provisioning | vSAN enables rapid provisioning of storage in the vCenter Server® during virtual machine creation and deployment operations. |
| SDK support | The VMware vSAN SDK for Java is an extension of the VMware vSphere Management SDK. It includes documentation, libraries and code examples that help developers automate installation, configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting of vSAN. |
