Tiered storage is probably one of the most effective uses of vSAN in a cloud environment. Many service providers deploy multiple tiers of offerings, for example, gold, silver, and bronze. Each provider virtual data center / resource cluster must be configured with a vSAN datastore that meets the specific capability requirements set out by the Service Level Agreement (SLA) for that tier of service.

For example, the number of acceptable failures allowed, cache/capacity ratio, and number of disk stripes per object for the gold offering can be higher than that of the silver or bronze offerings. The combination of storage policy, disk group configuration, and physical hardware can be used to efficiently and easily segment consumer storage resources into pools that align with the provider’s SLAs. See the vCloud Director with Virtual SAN Sample Use Case article at https://blogs.vmware.com/vcat/2015/09/vcloud-director-and-virtual-san-sample-use-case.html for a detailed description of this use case.