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In my experience, you can have Rancher deploy a cluster to a VSphere cloud provider without vSAN. I've deployed to VSphere (using a Ubuntu cloud image) and then added an NFS storage class (backed by a NetApp array) for persistent storage requirements. I cannot see why local data store would not work (though I've not used this personally). You just need to provision your nodes (VMs) with appropriately sized disks.

VSAN is not required

@acoustic-addition-45641 thanks for your reply. the issue I met is shown in the figure below. It’s a common case when using rancher to create multiple nodes at the same time, e.g. I want 3 master nodes, and for HA use case, they would better be placed on different physical machine in case one of pc is down. However, when using rancher to deploy k8s clusters, it needs user to provide a

data store

on which the hdd disks will be created and k8s nodes will take that hdd to install os and other softwares. I noticed that it seems that we could only choose one data store even when creating multiple nodes at the same time. If we have no vSAN, I don’t know if the hdd disk is created on the local machines with the node that placed on. great thanks.

Ah. So this sounds less about K8s persistent storage for workloads, and more of the desire to use seperate data stores for each VM in the machine pool. I misunderstood the end goal.

@acoustic-addition-45641 sorry for my unclarity.