Choosing a suitable storage solution is another piece of the deployment plan. You should consider what protocols will be used and their direct dependencies. For instance, a Fibre Channel (FC) storage device requires FC adapters to be installed on the server. vSphere supports software and hardware initiators (also known as host bus adapters (HBAs) or converged network adapters (CNA)) that add flexibility to your storage architecture design.

An ESXi host may use multiple storage protocols in the same installation to support the design requirements. It is not unusual to see different ESXi installations with FC and NFS storage devices connected at the same host and, in some scenarios, also with the addition of an iSCSI storage.