Data is what we normally use in operating systems, applications, documents, and so on.

A virtual machine is a pile of discrete files encapsulated in the form of the folder and then stored in the ESXi host's data store.

A VMware ESXi host's data stores are logical containers that hide the specifics of each storage device and provide a uniform model for storing virtual machine files. Depending on the type of storage that you use, data stores can be formatted with VMware vSphere VMFS, or mounted with a filesystem via the NFS protocol.

ESXi supports many more storage types, such as DAS, FC, FCOE, iSCSI, and NAS.

The DAS, FC, FCOE, and iSCSI storages are based on the block to read and write. Mainly, is formatted for the VMFS data store. The NAS is based on the file to read and write. The virtual machine's hard disk is written to the virtual disk file VMDK. The virtual machine's operating system, applications, and data, are written to the disk file. Shared storage...