Whether certain vSphere functionality is supported might depend on the storage technology that you use.
The following table compares networked storage technologies that ESXi supports.
Technology | Protocols | Transfers | Interface |
---|---|---|---|
Fibre Channel | FC/SCSI | Block access of data/LUN | FC HBA |
Fibre Channel over Ethernet | FCoE/SCSI | Block access of data/LUN |
|
iSCSI | IP/SCSI | Block access of data/LUN |
|
NAS | IP/NFS | File (no direct LUN access) | Network adapter |
The following table compares the vSphere features that different types of storage support.
Storage Type | Boot VM | vMotion | Datastore | RDM | VM Cluster | VMware HA and DRS | Storage APIs - Data Protection |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Local Storage | Yes | No | VMFS | No | Yes | No | Yes |
Fibre Channel | Yes | Yes | VMFS | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
iSCSI | Yes | Yes | VMFS | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
NAS over NFS | Yes | Yes | NFS 3 and NFS 4.1 | No | No | Yes | Yes |
Note: Local storage supports a cluster of virtual machines on a single host (also known as a cluster in a box). A shared virtual disk is required. For more information about this configuration, see the
vSphere Resource Management documentation.