A vSAN datastore is automatically created when you enable the vSAN feature. vSAN enables you to protect your data, even if a disk, host, network, or rack fails, with integrated distributed RAID and cache mirroring. Multiple options are available for deploying volumes that offer different levels of fault tolerance and performance. The following table shows the volume layout and configuration settings for the policies used for their deployment:

Table 2.       Volume layout and configuration settings per VM

The following figure shows the volume layout:

Figure 2.      vSAN datastore layout 

Volume deployment using SPBM

Storage operations can be automated with ease by using vSphere’s SPBM. With SPBM, vSphere administrators can use the vSphere interface for capacity planning and capacity headroom management. vSphere administrators can create policies to create multiple volumes through the easily accessible vCenter UI, which greatly eases deployment and automation. They can create policies for a set of volumes, which includes selecting the fault tolerance method, the number of failures to tolerate, and the number of stripes per object. These policies can then be edited in real time without any VM downtime. For a detailed description about using SPBM, see Appendix A.