The vSAN hybrid architecture was the original disk group configuration for vSAN, and uses mechanical disks for the capacity layer and flash memory devices for the cache layer.

A vSAN hybrid configuration uses the local attached storage to create a cost effective, highly available and high-performance shared storage for virtual machines. The flash devices are used for read cache and write buffer, while mechanical HDD drives are used for the persistent capacity storage requirements of virtual disk files (VMDKs), snapshots and swap. This option is ideal for workloads that have typical storage performance requirements.