Today I got an interesting question internally: Do files stored on vSAN with vSAN File Services count against the max object count? As I haven’t really discussed this in the past few years, I figured I would do a quick refresher. With vSAN File Services, the files people store on a file share are stored inside a vSAN object. The object itself counts towards the maximum component count you can have in a cluster, but of course the individual files do not.
When it comes to vSAN File Services, for each share you create, you will have to select a policy. The policy will be applied to the object that is created for the file share. Each object, as always, consists of one, or multiple, components. Those components will count towards the maximum number of components a vSAN cluster can have. For a vSAN ESA host the maximum number is 27k components, for vSAN OSA the maximum number of components per host is 9k. Do take into consideration that RAID-1 has a different number of components than RAID-6 for instance, but in general, this should for most customers not be a huge concern unless you have a very large environment (or a small environment and are pushing the boundaries in terms of shares etc).
I hope this helps. PS: The video below shows a demo I gave a few years back in which I inspect these components in the UI and CLI.
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