Fibre Channel SAN arrays, iSCSI SAN arrays, and NAS arrays are widely used storage technologies supported by VMware 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.

Figure 1. vSphere Data Center Physical Topology
Displays the relations between end points, server groups of virtual machines, and different types of storage. The endpoints are a vCenter Server instance, a system that has the vSphere Client, a system with Web access, a terminal system, and other unspecified systems. There are three server groups, but the graphic suggests there can be more. Each servers hosts multiple virtual machines running on ESXi. Ther server groips are connected to the storage through a fibre channel switch fabric or an IP network. The storage arrays are of type fibre channel, iSCSI, and NAS. The graphic suggests there can be more storage arrays.