minimum disk requirements vSAN for VCF 9

[VMHero4Ever]

We are currently planning to procure new vSAN ESA-ready hosts for a new VCF 9 (latest version!) environment. This environment is intended to consist of 8 ESXi hosts with a vSAN stretched cluster (4 per site).

It will also be a consolidated VCF design where management and workload run within the same cluster. I'm aware that this is not best practice, but this is only a test/dev environment.

However, our service provider has informed us that there are minimum requirements for a vSAN ESA cluster regarding the number and size of disks.

In other words, each host requires at least 4 disks, and in total each host must provide at least 12.5 TB of vSAN raw disk capacity.

This means that it is not allowed to install only 3 disks per host, each with a size of 3.2 TB?!

However, I was unable to find this requirement either in vSAN ESA documentation or anywhere in the VCF 9 design guide.

So what is correct?

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[snapfriend]

Hello

Your questions are more about vSAN. Please go through some questions n answers which are mentioned in above thread & linked with below articles

Below are the some glance of VMware vSAN Document FAQ

What are the hardware requirements when running vSAN?
The hardware requirements will depend on the capacity and performance requirements for your environment. The newer,
more powerful and efficient vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA) has different hardware requirements than the original
storage architecture (OSA). For the latest minimum hardware requirements for vSAN ReadyNodes, see the "vSAN ESA
ReadyNode Hardware Guidance" document. As of November 2025, vSAN ReadyNodes profiles certified for both vSAN HCI
clusters and vSAN storage clusters have been changed, with much lower hardware minimums. See the post: "Driving Down
Storage Costs with Lower Hardware Requirements for vSAN" for more details.
For a standard, single site topology, vSAN typically requires a minimum of three hosts, and can support as many as 64 hosts
in a single cluster. Although, it does have a "2-Node" deployment option that is more appropriate for remote/edge
environments. This will consist of two hosts storing the data resiliently, and a third host at a central location that helps
determine availability of the data.

How many storage devices can I use in a vSAN host? How many should I use?
In general, vSAN ESA supports from 1 to 24 storage devices per host – with a minimum of 2 storage devices per host for
storage clusters. Depending on the circumstances, the recommended number of storage devices used in a host will be
higher. Configuring hosts with 6 or more storage devices accomplishes several objectives.

Reference Articles

VMware vSAN FAQ

Verifying Compatibility for VMware Cloud Foundation Environments Powered by vSAN

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[VMHero4Ever]

I wasn't entirely sure whether VCF has different minimum requirements here compared to vSphere (for example, the minimum number of nodes in a vSAN stretched cluster).

From what it sounds like now, a vSAN ESA ReadyNode can be supported even with a single NVMe device (though I'm not sure if that would be considered best practice).

However, each node seems to require at least 3.2 TB of capacity, which honestly shouldn't be an issue. In any case, that's significantly lower than the 12.5 TB mentioned by our Broadcom partner.

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