What is VMware vSAN?

VMware vSAN is a software-defined hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) that transforms local server disks into a single scalable storage solution for virtual machines and containers. The solution integrates directly with the ESXi hypervisor and vSphere, enabling storage virtualization without the need for dedicated SAN/NAS devices.

VMware vSAN supports Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM), deduplication, compression, data encryption, erasure coding, stretched clusters (clustering across sites), high availability, and automatic data balancing. The platform allows the creation of fault-tolerant storage pools with performance and protection levels (RAID-1, RAID-5/6) and integrates with vSphere HA, DRS, vMotion, and Tanzu to support Kubernetes.

VMware vSAN is widely used as the foundation for private and hybrid clouds, HCI clusters, and edge computing, offering ease of management, hardware cost savings, high performance, and scalability from a few to thousands of nodes in large enterprise IT environments.