VMware SAN transport mode may be used where the proxy for the VMware node is a physical machine connected to the same Fibre Channel or iSCSI SAN as the storage devices used to hold the VM datastores as shown in figure Figure 1 below.
With this topology,VMware SAN Transport Mode may be used to transfer data directly between the datastores and the destination. This method is efficient at passing virtual disk data between a VM and the proxy as no data will traverse the LAN.
It is recommended that the Repository and VMware Nodes should reside on the same Proxy Host as to minimise loss of data transfer speed. The SAN is used for data transfer between the VMware datastore and the Proxy Host. If the Repository node is on a separate host, data transfer between the repository and Proxy Host will be over the LAN in addition to the transfer over the SAN between datastore and Proxy Host.