A named pointer in the workspace to Blob, Azure Files or ADLS Gen2 storage that keeps the connection details, so code never needs to carry storage keys itself.
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Terms in this definition
- PTR
Turns an IP address back into a host name. These records live in reverse lookup zones.
- Workspace
Teams in Power BI and Microsoft Fabric collaborate in this folder-style container, which groups items such as reports, semantic models and lakehouses, controls who can access them and is assigned a capacity.
- BLOB
Short for binary large object: raw binary data, like pictures, audio, video or documents, that only an application can make sense of. Azure keeps these files as blobs in Blob Storage.
- Azure Files
Azure's managed file shares over SMB or NFS. There is no Archive tier, and a single encryption key applies across the whole storage account.
- ADLS Gen2
Short for Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2: a standard GPv2 account with hierarchical namespace turned on, so analytics workloads get true directories and POSIX-style ACLs.
- General-purpose v1
The older storage account kind (
Storage), which lacks access tiers, Archive and premium file shares and retires on 13 October 2026. Converting to ZRS requires first upgrading to GPv2, a one-way change. - Connection
Resource that attaches a virtual network gateway to its peer, which may be an ExpressRoute circuit, a second VNet gateway (Vnet2Vnet) or a local network gateway over IPsec. Resetting it recovers a single tunnel and avoids rebooting the whole gateway.
Related terms
- azureml:// URI
Data reference syntax in Azure Machine Learning, written
azureml://datastores/<name>/paths/<path>, that locates data through a datastore already registered in the workspace. - HCI
Hyperconverged infrastructure: x86 servers supply both processing and storage, as with vSAN pooling each ESX host's local drives into one datastore, instead of relying on external arrays or vSAN storage clusters.
- retreat mode
Switches vSphere Cluster Services (vCLS) off for a cluster, rather than relocating vCLS VMs ahead of datastore maintenance. As of vCenter 9.0, which deprecates vCLS, it is the recommended approach, and HA and DRS carry on unaffected.
- vSAN
VMware's software-defined storage, which combines local devices across a cluster's ESX hosts into one shared datastore. Available as OSA or ESA, VCF can use it as principal storage.
- vSAN datastore sharing
Lets one vSAN cluster use storage from another, whether a vSAN HCI or storage cluster, by mounting its datastore, even under a different vCenter; it was previously called HCI Mesh.
- vVols
Storage approach in which arrays that support VASA present a storage container to vSphere as a datastore, holding each VM disk as its own object. It is deprecated as of 9.0 for both VCF and vSphere Foundation.