VASA is a set of APIs (introduced in vSphere 5.0) that will enable vCenter to see the capabilities of the datastores at storage side, making it much easier to select the appropriate datastore for virtual machine placement. Storage capabilities, such as RAID level, thin or thick provisioned, replication state, and much more can now be made visible within vCenter, without the need for a specific plugin. You just need a VASA provider (usually a web service) that exposes all of those capabilities.

VASA minimizes the need to manually manage the information of the capabilities of each LUN, usually performed by documentation or naming conventions, and makes a simple guaranteeing of the correct Service Level Agreement (SLA) to virtual machines.

With vSphere 6.0, a new VASA 2.0 has been introduced to manage VVols.