Health information reported by a drive itself, which ESX reads through the storage core device smart get command. A status warning of impending failure can set off vSAN's dying disk handling.
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Each book explains SMART in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- ESX
VMware's bare-metal hypervisor, installed on each host in a VCF fleet. Up to version 9.0 it was known as ESXi.
- 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. - Get
Key Vault permission on secrets that allows a single secret to be read; App Service Key Vault references need nothing beyond it.
- Set
Secret permission in Key Vault for writing secrets; some older material refers to it as Create.
- 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.
Related terms
- Behavioural learning tools
Efficiency reports, smart alerts, anomaly detection and right sizing for VMs, all driven by machine learning in Prism Central that examines how resources are consumed.
- Business Scenario
A SMART write-up of an actual business problem. It sets out who is involved, the hoped-for outcomes, the value streams and capabilities affected, and the surrounding business and technology context, and is chiefly applied in Phases A and B, though any phase that must derive requirements, the Preliminary Phase included, can use one.
- Cluster rebuild preference
Decides how rebuilds behave during planned maintenance. Smart is the default from AOS 6.8 and separates maintenance from real failures so fewer rebuilds run needlessly; the other option is Immediate, and the deprecated Delayed becomes Smart.
- Image Analysis 4.0
More recent release of Image Analysis, whose improved models handle Read, captioning (including dense captions), tagging, object and people detection and smart cropping. It is deprecated, with retirement set for 25 September 2028.