What does vSAN use to create a distributed storage architecture for VMs?

vSAN, or VMware vSphere Virtual SAN, utilizes direct attached storage from the hosts to create a distributed storage architecture for virtual machines (VMs). This approach allows each ESXi host within a cluster to contribute its local storage resources, such as hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs), to form a single shared datastore. By pooling local storage from multiple hosts, vSAN enables high availability, redundancy, and improved performance, which are essential characteristics of a modern virtual datacenter.

Using direct attached storage supports various capabilities inherent in vSAN, such as storage policy-based management, which allows administrators to define storage requirements per VM based on performance and availability needs. The architecture is inherently flexible, as it can scale out by simply adding more hosts with their own storage resources, thereby increasing the overall capacity and performance of the virtual storage.

The other options, while related to storage solutions in different contexts, do not apply to vSAN's architecture. Local SSDs only focus on individual storage devices rather than a distributed approach. Shared storage arrays imply centralized storage configurations that do not leverage the distributed nature of vSAN. Cloud storage solutions refer to external storage options that are not utilized in the core mechanism of vSAN's operation. Thus