When leveraging vSAN with a vCloud Director based cloud infrastructure, the typical service provider architecture consists of two clusters based on vSAN. The first is a management cluster, which hosts all components needed for a vCloud Director environment, in conjunction with a resource cluster. This enables the provider to start out with a relatively low investment in hardware and quickly scale as new customers are added or when existing customers require new hardware in the cloud environment.

This design is in alignment with typical cloud architecture in which the management components are deployed in the management cluster and tenant workloads are hosted in the resource cluster. It enables the provider to offer different SLAs for management components and tenant workloads, provides separation of duties, and allows both clusters to easily scale by adding hosts where needed. The following figure shows this architecture.

When designing a vSAN backed vCloud Director infrastructure, VMware recommends not using a vSAN datastore for catalogs. All catalog media images are uploaded as file objects into the same directory structure by vCloud Director. If the same vSAN datastore is used as storage policy for different catalogs, they share one VM Home Namespace object with maximum size of 256 GB. In this case, use a third-party virtual storage appliance that provides NFS file services to provide catalogs that scale larger than 256 GB.