Excluding vSAN, which has a specific configuration, at the physical level we can have three different main types of storage:
- Block-based storage acceded by a hardware adapter: This includes DAS storage or a SAN FC storage.
- Block-based storage acceded by a software adapter: This is like the SAN iSCSI storage when the software initiator is used. In this case, you need first to properly configure the network connectivity. After that, it becomes very similar to the first case.
- NFS storage: This is where you have to configure first the IP network connectivity to your storage and then connect the NFS datastore.
For the physical storage adapters, VMware ESXi supports several types of protocols and technologies ...