Selecting a NVME SSD for a new ESXi Host

Which SSD Make/Model to buy?

If you are buying new ESXi servers, then order the servers with at least one U.2 slot for an NVME SSD. Our recommended NVME SSD in the U.2 form factor is the Intel P4610 SSD. As you can see from this link on the Intel site, the 1.6TB P4610 does 643K IOPS Random Reads and 200K IOPS Random Writes, and it is warranted for 12 Petabytes writes. As of 2020, it costs US 50 cents per GB.

If you don’t have a U.2 slot, then ensure that your server has a spare PCIe x8 (or wider) slot, since NVME SSDs also come in conventional PCIe form factor. You could then buy the Samsung PM1725 NVME SSD in the PCIe x8 form factor. As the table on page 2 of this link on the Samsung website shows, it does 980K IOPS random reads and 190K IOPS random writes. The 1.6TB SSD is warranted for 9 Petabytes writes. This SSD costs US 40 cents per GB.

How much SSD capacity per host?

10-20% of storage used by all VMs on the host should be the cache capacity for VirtuCache. Both the above SSDs above come in 1.6TB and 3.2 TB capacities.

If the total storage capacity used by all the VMs on a host is under 10TB then the 1.6TB capacity suffices. If all the VMs on a host are using more than 10TB storage then use the 3.2TB SSD in each host.