The specific NVME SSDs I recommend are the Samsung PM1735, for a conventional PCIe slot in the VMware host, and the Intel P4610 for a 15mm U.2 slot in the host. NVME SSDs are by far the best choice for host side caching in VMware. They are the same price…
VirtuCache
VMware has two categories of SSD Host Caches — those that swap out memory contents to SSD when host memory is full, and those that cache storage requests to host Flash / RAM. In the former category are the below VMware features. VMware’s ‘Host Cache Configuration’ feature VMware’s ‘Virtual Flash…
The big difference between the two is that VSA can cache only reads and only from the Master/Replica VM in Horizon VDI.1,2 VirtuCache caches reads and writes from all server & desktop VMs, and it can cache to TBs of in-host SSD or RAM, with the goal of servicing all storage…
By caching all writes from VMs to VMware host SSD or RAM, VirtuCache reduces write latency for VMs that are deployed in a VMware Metro / Stretched Storage Cluster (vMSC), and eliminates latency of the WAN link from factoring into VM latencies, thus improving the performance of VMs however slow…
In terms of price/performance, enterprise NVME SSDs have now become the best choice for in-VMware host caching media. They are higher performing and cost just a little more than their lower performing SATA counterparts. The Samsung PM1735 (in PCIe form factor) and the Intel P4610 (2.5″ U.2 form factor) NVME…
If your SQL Server runs in a VMware VM and it has performance issues, the root cause of which is slow storage, then our host side caching software for VMware, called VirtuCache, will be able to fix this problem. This post explains how VirtuCache does this by explaining the read…
Dell’s PowerEdge VRTX hyper-converged appliance can either have all hard drive datastores or all SSD datastores, but you can’t have SSDs or RAM act as tiering or caching media for VRTX volumes / virtual disks. That’s where VirtuCache comes in.
Even when Ontap Select is using high-performance enterprise SSDs, it shows high latencies because there are quite a few file system layers that the storage IO must traverse. Within Ontap Select, you first create a separate VMFS Datastore on each locally attached SSD or HDD on each host in the…
For the lowest latency VDI VMs, the VMs should be running from in-host RAM. The combination of two facts – that RAM is the lowest latency media there is, and it is on the same motherboard as the host CPU, makes this storage architecture for VDI higher performing than any other….
The quickest to find out if you have storage performance issues in ESXi is by doing SSH (use putty) to the ESXi host and typing the command ‘esxtop’ and then typing the letter ‘v’.