A reasonably frequent requirement is to be able to export Ceph storage and consume it via VMware's ESXi hypervisor. ESXi supports iSCSI block storage that's formatted with its own VMFS clustered filesystem and file-based NFS storage. Both are fully functional and supported, meaning that it is normally a matter of user preference as to which is implemented or what's best supported by their storage array.
When exporting Ceph storage to ESXi, there are a number of additional factors that may need to be taken into consideration when using Ceph as a storage provider and when deciding between iSCSI and NFS. As such, this section of this chapter is dedicated to explaining the additional factors that should be taken into consideration when presenting Ceph storage to ESXi.
The first thing to consider is that ESXi was developed with enterprise storage arrays...