A storage administrator is being presented with the following VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) architectural details:•...

vSAN ESA Storage Clusters are the optimal choice because the workload profile is capacity-heavy and benefits from disaggregated storage. The requirement for 2.5 PB of application data, archival workloads, gateways, and development/test applications indicates a need to scale storage capacity independently from compute resources. VMware Cloud Foundation describes a vSAN storage cluster as a disaggregated storage solution based on vSAN ESA. It provides storage resources but not compute resources, and its datastore can be mounted by vSAN compute clusters or vSAN HCI clusters. This model is designed for storage-dense environments where capacity and performance can be expanded without adding unnecessary compute. A standard vSAN ESA HCI cluster is excellent for high-performance workloads, but it scales compute and storage together. vSAN OSA all-flash and hybrid use the older disk-group architecture and are less suitable for this large-capacity, storage-centric design. Therefore, the principal storage recommendation should be vSAN ESA Storage Clusters to meet scalability, performance, and capacity growth requirements. Reference topics: vSAN Storage Cluster, Disaggregated Storage, vSAN ESA, Storage Models.