Comparing Types of Storage – VMware

Posted By Rajesh Radhakrishnan January 30 2018

The following table compares networked storage technologies that vSphere supports.

Networked Storage that ESXi Supports

Technology

Protocols

Transfers

Interface

Fibre Channel

FC/SCSI

Block access of data/LUN

FC HBA

Fibre Channel over Ethernet

FCoE/SCSI

Block access of data/LUN

  • Converged Network Adapter (hardware FCoE)

  • NIC with FCoE support (software FCoE)

iSCSI

IP/SCSI

Block access of data/LUN

  • iSCSI HBA or iSCSI-enabled NIC (hardware iSCSI)

  • Network adapter (software iSCSI)

NAS

IP/NFS

File (no direct LUN access)

Network adapter

The following table compares the vSphere features that different types of storage support.

vSphere Features Supported by Storage

Storage Type

Boot VM

vMotion

Datastore

RDM

VM Cluster

VMware HA and DRS

Storage APIs – Data Protection

Local Storage

Yes

No

VMFS

No

Yes

No

Yes

Fibre Channel

Yes

Yes

VMFS

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

iSCSI

Yes

Yes

VMFS

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

NAS over NFS

Yes

Yes

NFS 3 and NFS 4.1

No

No

Yes

Yes
Note:

Local storage supports a cluster of virtual machines on a single host (also known as a cluster in a box). A shared virtual disk is required.