Designing a Shared VCF 9.1 Recovery Site for vSAN, VMFS, and NFS Workloads

This article explores the design of a shared VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 disaster recovery site that supports heterogeneous workloads on vSAN, VMFS, and NFS datastores. It highlights the shift from fragmented recovery architectures to a centralized vSAN ESA target, enabling fan-in designs where multiple source clusters replicate to one recovery site. Key design aspects include storage sizing for full protected footprint, compute sizing for concurrent recovery events, preserving failure-domain resilience, isolating replication traffic, and aligning protection groups with application ownership. The article also discusses using this architecture as a migration bridge from VMFS/NFS to vSAN, emphasizing deliberate sequencing, testing, and cutover planning. It provides practical guidance for IT architects and engineers implementing robust, scalable disaster recovery solutions in VCF environments.