A VM is configured with hard disks totaling 100 GB allocated The VM is using a RAID 5 vSAN Storage Policy What is the total space that is consumed on the vSAN Datastore?

A vSAN storage policy using RAID 5 (erasure coding) with the default Failures to Tolerate (FTT) of 1 is designed for space efficiency. This configuration stripes data across a minimum of four hosts (three data blocks and one parity block). The space overhead for this protection scheme is 33%. Therefore, a 100 GB virtual disk will consume 1.33 times its original size on the vSAN datastore. The calculation is 100 GB 1.33 = 133 GB. This method provides single-failure protection while being more space-efficient than RAID 1 mirroring.

A. 200 GB: This is the space consumption for a RAID 1 (Mirroring) policy with FTT=1, which creates a full copy of the data, resulting in a 2x space multiplier.
B. 100 GB: This represents the space consumed with no data protection (Failures to Tolerate = 0), where only the primary copy of the data is stored.
D. 166 GB: This amount does not correspond to a standard vSAN RAID 5 policy. It is closer to the consumption of a RAID 6 (FTT=2) policy, which has a 1.5x multiplier (150 GB).

1. VMware vSAN Documentation: Administering VMware vSAN 8.0, "Space Consumption for RAID 5 or RAID 6". The documentation states, "For an object that is 100 GB, RAID 5 consumes 133 GB." This confirms the 1.33x space multiplier for RAID 5 configurations.

2. Dell Technologies Info Hub: Dell VxRail™ Series TechBook, section "vSAN Storage Policies". This guide explains that VxRail leverages vSAN storage policies to define VM storage characteristics. It details that RAID 5/6 (Erasure Coding) is a space-efficient data protection option, contrasting it with the higher capacity consumption of RAID 1 (Mirroring).

3. VMware vSAN Documentation: vSAN Planning and Deployment Guide 7.0, Chapter 3, "vSAN Storage Policies," section "Understanding vSAN Storage Policy Space Overhead." This guide provides tables and examples showing that a RAID-5 (FTT=1) policy requires 1.33x the virtual disk size for storage capacity.