API that lets storage providers describe their capabilities to vCenter, feeding SPBM. vVols arrays must have one; vSAN registers its own automatically.
Also called vSphere APIs for Storage Awareness.
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Terms in this definition
- API
Short for application programming interface: a contract that client code calls programmatically, for example a web API secured with tokens or the Files, Images or Responses APIs.
- 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. - Description (Image Analysis 3.2)
Visual feature in Image Analysis 3.2 that produces natural-language caption sentences sorted by confidence, read from Description.Captions[0].Text. Version 4.0 swaps it for Caption.
- vCenter
Management software for VMs, clusters and ESX hosts. Each domain in VCF gets a dedicated one.
- Storage Policy Based Management
vSphere's mechanism for pairing each VM's storage needs, captured in VM storage policies, with suitable datastores and data services, while reporting whether VMs comply.
- vSphere Virtual Volumes
Deprecated in vSphere 9.0, this framework has the array, through VASA, hold every virtual machine disk as an individual volume, grouped into storage containers.
- 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
- Storage container
Raw capacity on a vVols-capable array, presented through its VASA provider and shown in vCenter as a vVols datastore.
- 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.