What is the purpose of the vSAN service?

The vSAN service is specifically designed to manage and optimize storage resources within a vSphere environment. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the integration of the virtualization layer with storage management, making it easier to provide high-performance storage capabilities directly from the hypervisor. When vSAN traffic is activated on a host, it enables the hypervisor to leverage the local storage resources of the ESXi hosts as a distributed, shared datastore. This enhances storage performance and efficiency by aggregating local storage across multiple hosts in a cluster, allowing for faster data access, improved fault tolerance, and simplified management of storage resources.

In contrast to other functions mentioned in the options, activating vSAN traffic does not directly involve managing snapshots, configuring networking settings, or specifically optimizing CPU usage. Each of those tasks is handled by different components within the VMware ecosystem. Therefore, the correct answer captures the essence of what vSAN aims to accomplish in terms of storage integration and management within the vSphere infrastructure.