A systems administrator is building a new virtualization cluster. The cluster consists of five virtual hosts, which each have flash and spinning disks. This storage is shared among all the virtual hos

A SAN is a dedicated high-speed network that provides shared block-level storage access across multiple hosts; in this scenario the flash and spinning disks from each of the five hosts are pooled and accessible over the network fabric, matching the fundamental SAN definition where storage is logically separated from compute and shared across hosts. Any virtual machine can access storage residing on a different physical host, which is the core characteristic of SAN-based storage.

A network file system provides file-level protocol access to shared storage rather than the block-level pooled storage described across multiple hosts.

Hyperconverged storage is a specific tightly integrated architecture managed by a single software platform where compute, storage, and networking are unified in one appliance, which is a more precise and prescriptive definition than the general shared-storage topology described.

Thick provisioning is a disk allocation method where the full storage capacity is reserved at creation time, not a description of how storage is shared or networked across hosts.