A datastore is a collection of physical storage that is created based on the disks and LUNs that are attached to an ESX server. The storage is assigned to VMware virtual machines from the datastore. Veritas Operations Manager lets you view the storage mapping between the datastore and the virtual machines.

A datastore is a storage location for virtual machine files.This storage location can be a VMFS volume, a directory on Network Attached Storage, or a local file system path.

Also, VMware can assign storage to the virtual machines directly from the physical disks that are available with the ESX servers. This storage assignment is known as Raw Disk Assignment.