An administrator is deploying a new two-node vSAN cluster with a shared witness to a remote location. Which requirement must be met?

Question

Options

• AThe ESXi hosts must have SSDs or NVMe configured for Virtual Flash File System.
• BThe ESXi host's controller cache and advanced features must be disabled.
• CThe ESXi host's drives must be configured in RAID 1 to support Failures to Tolerate of 1.
• DThe ESXi hosts must have a minimum of 64 GBs of memory.

• A
  5% (3)
• B
  80% (44)
• C
  11% (6)
• D
  4% (2)

Explanation

In a vSAN environment, VMware requires that storage controllers operate in passthrough (HBA) mode, which means disabling the controller's onboard cache and advanced features like write-back buffering. vSAN manages its own I/O path and data integrity directly, and an active controller cache can intercept writes before they reach the drives, potentially causing data corruption or bypassing vSAN's consistency guarantees.

Why the distractors are wrong:

• A is wrong because Virtual Flash File System (vFlash) is for host-based read caching, a separate feature unrelated to vSAN disk configuration.
• C is wrong because vSAN explicitly replaces hardware RAID - it handles redundancy through software-defined storage policies (FTT), and using hardware RAID actually breaks vSAN's ability to see individual drives.
• D is wrong because 64 GB of RAM is not a documented minimum for two-node vSAN; memory requirements scale with disk groups and workload, but no such hard floor exists for this topology.

Memory tip: Think of it as "vSAN needs naked drives." Any hardware intelligence between vSAN and the physical disks - RAID, cache, or buffering - must be stripped away so vSAN has full, direct control. If the controller is "doing something," turn it off.

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