The storage provider describes capabilities of a storage array, which the storage policy service obtains and presents to the administrator to assist with VM provisioning.
On object-oriented datastores such as vSAN and VVol datastores, storage capabilities originate from software written by the vendor, called a VASA provider. VASA is an abbreviation of vSphere API for storage awareness. The storage policy service can match storage capabilities with VM storage policies formulated in vSphere.
For VVol datastores: storage capabilities may include array type, vendor, RAID level, read latency, write latency, snapshot information, backup frequency, replication, caching, compression, deduplication, and high availability.
For vSAN datastores: storage capabilities may include RAID type, failures to tolerate, disk stripes per object, flash read cache, IOPS limit, encryption, compression, and deduplication.
For VMFS and NFS datastores: administrators can select the VMware encryption storage policy. VM encryption is implemented on the ESXi host rather than on the storage array.
For tag-based policies: administrators can use the vSphere Web Client to define storage policy tags.
