In my VMWare environment under Datastores I have some named datastores _local

can you provide a screenshot ?

most likely you have shared storage datastores and datastores that are specifically tied to your local ESXi hosts.

These are probably rack mounted servers with local hard disks in them, and the _local data stores are residing on these local disks.

If the host has local storage by default VMware will lable it datastore and datastore1 if one already exist. Maybe someone renamed the local datastore to the name you are seeing

Yes I will post tomorrow sorry site emergency had me away.  Appreciate the feedback so far

see attached it is the _local ones I'm curious about.
Capture.PNG

if you select the datastore, which host does it apply to, which will be shown on the right hand pane.

I assume that USGU has a meaning ? hostname maybe ?

if so it's a local datastore, which is connected to that host, e.g. it's not share storage, it's a physical local disk attached to that name host.

Hello,  If I select i.e. USGUSS00733_Local for example and go to hosts I see usguss00733.domain.net which is one of my Cisco UCS Blade Host machines.  Thus are you saying this would be the hard drives on the Host i.e. my ESXi configs?

Yes USGUS is our naming for host names on the domain.

So if this is an external server (via the name) is it the local disk on that stand alone server?

Highly likely. single disk or disks, or RAID array or leftover spare space, on flash drive, SD card etc

check the server, and check which local datastore is attached.