vSAN is VMware’s software-defined storage solution specifically engineered for vSphere VMs. It abstracts and aggregates locally attached disks in a vSphere cluster to create a storage solution that can be provisioned and managed from vCenter and the vSphere Web Client. vSAN integrates with the entire VMware stack, including features like vMotion, HA, and DRS. VM storage provisioning and day-to-day management of SLAs can all be controlled through VM-level policies that can be set and modified on-the-fly. vSAN delivers enterprise-class features, scale, and performance, making it the ideal storage platform for VMs.

The figure below shows an example of a hybrid configuration where each node contributes storage capacity to the shared storage vSAN datastore. The SSD drive provides caching to optimize performance and hard disk drives for capacity. All-flash configurations (not shown) use flash SSDs for both the caching tier and capacity tier.

Figure 39.    vSAN datastore