SSD

08 Jan: 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…

05 May: U.2 to PCIe Adapter for NVME SSDs

If you plan on using NVME SSD as a cache device and you don’t have a NVME slot in the ESXi host. You could either buy a NVME SSD in PCIe form factor like the Intel P4600 2TB or Samsung PM1725 1.6TB. Both these SSDs are highly recommended, but they…

27 Mar: SSD failure alert in vCenter

If a SSD starts to fail, it first starts to slow down , especially for writes, then it becomes read only , and at that point VirtuCache is not able to write to the SSD so VMs and Datastores move to uncached mode automatically. Your VMs go back to performing as…

23 Mar: FusionIO cards in ESXi 6.x

Sandisk FusionIO PCIE flash cards like IoDrive2 are some of the best SSDs on the market, comparable to newer NVME cards. Especially for low queue depth workload like VDI, they are even better performing. However please keep in mind that they use a lot of memory on the host. 20GB…

06 Jan: SSD fails to attach to VirtuCache

If you get an error of the type: “Failed: Assign SSD for Caching on host” while trying to assign an SSD to VirtuCache, then its most likely because of any of the below reasons. 1. The SSD is being used as a VMware Datastore. If so, you will have to unmount…

21 Jul: How does VirtuCache handle host SSD failure?

SSD failure in VirtuCache is handled differently in ‘Write-Through’ (accelerates only reads) and ‘Write-Back’ (accelerates reads and writes) caching policies. In both Write-Through and Write-Back caching policies, read caching works in the same way. Frequently and recently used reads are copied from backend storage to in-host SSD. So if the…