Are vSAN resources available to all hosts/VMs within the vCenter data center?

[djhartm]

Or, are they only available to hosts actively participating within the vSAN cluster?

Also, in traditional SAN, you have strong control over which hosts/VM's have access to which resources. Are there such controls in vSAN, or do all VMs have open access to vSAN datastores?

I'm currently taking the vSAN 6.7 Deploy & Configure course and so far, this has not been covered.

Thanks

[daphnissov · Accepted solution]

The storage resources pooled by vSAN are only available to VMs within the cluster. The exception to this is with the iSCSI service which can be optionally exposed, other workloads outside of the cluster (however, not other ESXi hosts) can consume that storage.

[TheBobkin]

Hello djhartm​

Welcome to Communities and vSAN.

VMs only have access to the vmdks assigned to them - this isn't so dissimilar to how it is with SAN-backed LUNs (where VMs can access any data on vmdks assigned to them provided the datastores are available) other than it is one big datastore as opposed to multiple.

Bob

[djhartm]

Thank you for the answers!