Which datastore types are commonly supported by VMware products such as ESXi and VCSA?

Which datastore types are commonly supported by VMware products such as ESXi and VCSA?

• A. vSAN, VMFS, NFS
• B. NAS, VMFS, NFS
• C. VVol, VMFS, NFS
• D. vSAN, NFS, CIFS

Answer: (A)

Datastores in ESXi come in a few standard forms that VMware supports directly: VMFS, a block-based filesystem on SAN or local disks; NFS, a network file share presented over the NFS protocol; and vSAN, the software-defined storage pool that aggregates disks across a cluster to present a single datastore. These three cover the common deployment patterns: VMFS for block storage connections, NFS for NAS-based file storage, and vSAN for an integrated, cluster-wide datastore. The other options mix terms that aren’t datastore types in the same sense (NAS is a general category, CIFS/SMB isn’t used as a datastore) and Virtual Volumes represent a different provisioning model rather than a separate, standalone datastore type.

Datastores in ESXi come in a few standard forms that VMware supports directly: VMFS, a block-based filesystem on SAN or local disks; NFS, a network file share presented over the NFS protocol; and vSAN, the software-defined storage pool that aggregates disks across a cluster to present a single datastore. These three cover the common deployment patterns: VMFS for block storage connections, NFS for NAS-based file storage, and vSAN for an integrated, cluster-wide datastore. The other options mix terms that aren’t datastore types in the same sense (NAS is a general category, CIFS/SMB isn’t used as a datastore) and Virtual Volumes represent a different provisioning model rather than a separate, standalone datastore type.