VMware vSAN was developed with simplicity in mind, both from a design and a deployment perspective. VMware vSANs uniform platform architecture is meant to be applicable to all virtualization use-cases and seeks to provide important capabilities either natively or by leveraging features already present in the VMware hypervisor, vSphere, on a per-VM basis. However, there are still some key areas where vSAN still relies heavily on external products and where there is no tight integration involved (eg. backup/restore). In these cases choices need to made whether to incorporate 1st party of 3rd party solutions into the overall technical design.