Home > Storage > PowerVault > Guides > Dell PowerVault ME5 Series: VMware vSphere Best Practices > Direct-attached storage
PowerVault ME5 arrays support direct-attached Fibre Channel (16/32 Gb), iSCSI (10/25 Gb), and SAS connectivity. Using direct-attached hosts removes the financial costs associated with a SAN fabric from the environment but limits the scale to which the environment can grow. While PowerVault ME5 storage can support up to eight direct-attached servers, this configuration is achieved by providing only a non-redundant, single connection to each server. As a best practice, ensure each host has a dual-path configuration with a single path to each controller, enabling storage access to continue in the event of controller failure. This practice limits the number of direct-attached servers to four but enables controller redundancy and increased performance.
The following figure shows a configuration with four servers, each with two Fibre Channel, iSCSI, or SAS connections to the PowerVault ME5 array.