NVMe Memory Tiering Design and Sizing on VMware Cloud Foundation 9 Part 3: Sizing for Success

Discover more from VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Blog Related Articles NVMe Memory Tiering Design and Sizing on VMware Cloud Foundation 9 Part 3: Sizing for Success Making Harbor Production-Ready: Essential Considerations for Deployment Reducing Harbor Deployment Complexity on Kubernetes So far in this blog series, we have highlighted the value that NVMe Memory Tiering delivers to our customers and how this is driving adoption. Who doesn’t want to reduce their cost by ~40% just by adopting VMware Cloud Foundation 9?! We’ve also touched on pre-requisites, and hardware in Part 1 , and design in Part 2 ; so, let’s now talk about properly sizing your environment so you can maximize your investment while reducing your cost. Proper sizing for NVMe Memory Tiering is mainly on the hardware side, but there are two possible ways to look at this; greenfield and brownfield deployments. Let’s start with brownfield deployments, which is adopting Memory Tiering on existing infrastructure. You’ve came to the realization that VCF 9 is truly an integrated product delivering a cohesive cloud like solution and decided to deploy it but just learned about Memory Tiering. Don’t worry, you can still introduce NVMe memory Tiering after deployment of VCF 9. After reading Part 1 and Part 2, we’ve learned the importance of the NVMe performance and endurance classes as well as the understanding the 50% active memory requirement. This means that we need to think about purchasing an NVMe device that is at least the same size of our DRAM, since we will double our memory capacity. So, if each of your hosts have 1TB of DRAM we should at least have 1TB NVMe devices, easy enough. However, we can go bigger and still be cheaper than buying more DIMMS, let me explain. I’ve made it a point to say “buy an NVMe device to be at least the same size of DRAM”, and this is because we use a DRAM:NVMe ratio of 1:1 by default, so half of the memory comes from DRAM and half comes from NVMe. Now, there are workloads that may not be doing a whole lot as far as memory activity, think some VDI workloads.