There are four main types of vSphere datastores:
- VMFS Datastore: The vSphere Virtual Machine filesystem format is a proprietary VMware filesystem used for block-based storage.
- NFS Datastore: Used for file-based storage. ESXi 6.x supports versions 3 and 4.1 of the NFS protocol.
- Virtual SAN: vSAN use its own filesystem (depending on the vSAN version) and is identified as a single shared datastore with its own type.
- Virtual Volumes: The vVOLs datastore is the entire storage container that stores all vVOLs objects.
All of these have been described in the previous sections.