Since Storage Viewer for Virtual Servers maps the VMs to the actual physical storage, it is important to understand the Datastore. The Datastore is the container for the VMs and their configuration files, VM disks, and other files, such as the ISO files that are used for installing a virtual machine. A Datastore can be located on DAS SCSI, FC SAN arrays, iSCSI, or NAS drives. The Datastore is the storage provisioning source for one or more VMs, on one or more hosts, mapping to one or more physical storage devices.

All of the objects managed by VMware vCenter comprise the VM inventory: hosts, clusters, VMs, and Networks.