VMware vSphere supports different types of storage architectures, both internally (in this case the controller is crucial, that must be in the HCL) or externally with shared SAS DAS, SAN FC, SAN iSCSI, SAN FCoE, or NFS NAS (in those case the HCL is fundamental for the external storage, the fabric elements, and the host adapters).
For local storage, with vSphere 6.x it's possible to use USB disks, not only as boot disks, but also to run VMs. But note that USB datastores are just unsupported by VMware.