At the high level, VMware vSphere will access each storage using datastores—a logical paradigm to abstract all storage types, like a common operating system uses letters or mount points to access a filesystem.
VMware vSphere 6.x has the following four main types of datastore:
- VMware FileSystem (VMFS) datastores: All block-based storage must be first formatted with VMFS to transform a block service to a file and folder oriented services
- Network FileSystem (NFS) datastores: This is for NAS storage
- VVol: This is introduced in vSphere 6.0 and is a new paradigm to access SAN and NAS storage in a common way and by better integrating and consuming storage array capabilities
- vSAN datastore: If you are using ...