You can use VMware vSphere without a shared storage device, but it limits the amount of advanced features that you can use with it. Certain features in vSphere require that a virtual machine (VM) reside on a shared storage device that is accessible by multiple hosts concurrently. These features include high availability (HA), Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), Fault Tolerance (FT) and VMotion, which provide high/continuous availability as well as workload load balancing and live migration of virtual machines. For some storage administrators, these features may only be nice to have, but they are also essential for many IT environments that cannot afford to have VMs down for an extended amount of time.
A few years ago, VMware shared storage typically meant using a Fibre Channel (FC) SAN, which was expensive, required specialized equipment and was complicated to manage. In recent years, other shared storage options that utilize standard network components to connect to storage devices have become popular and make for affordable, easy-to-use shared storage solutions. The protocols used for this are iSCSI and NFS, both of which are natively supported in vSphere. The performance of NFS and iSCSI are similar, but both can vary depending on a variety of factors including the data storage device characteristics, network speed/latency and host server resources. Since both protocols use software built into vSphere to manage the storage connections over the network there is some minimal CPU resource usage on the host server as a result.
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