Objects and Components
Each object is composed of a set of components, determined by capabilities that are in use in the VM Storage Policy. For example, with Primary level of failures to tolerate set to 1, vSAN ensures that the protection components, such as replicas and witnesses, are placed on separate hosts in the vSAN cluster, where each replica is an object component. In addition, in the same policy, if the Number of disk stripes per object configured to two or more, vSAN also stripes the object across multiple capacity devices and each stripe is considered a component of the specified object. When needed, vSAN might also break large objects into multiple components.
A vSAN datastore contains the following object types:
VM Home Namespace
The virtual machine home directory where all virtual machine configuration files are stored, such as .vmx, log files, vmdks, and snapshot delta description files.
VMDK
A virtual machine disk or .vmdk file that stores the contents of the virtual machine's hard disk drive.
VM Swap Object
Created when a virtual machine is powered on.
Snapshot Delta VMDKs
Created when virtual machine snapshots are taken.
Memory object
Created when the snapshot memory option is selected when creating or suspending a virtual machine.