NVMe Memory Tiering Design and Sizing on VMware Cloud Foundation 9 Part 4: vSAN Compatibility and Storage Considerations

Storage Considerations Discover more from VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Blog Related Articles NVMe Memory Tiering Design and Sizing on VMware Cloud Foundation 9 Part 4: vSAN Compatibility and Storage Considerations Using Harbor as a Proxy Cache for Cloud-Based Registries What to Look for in Network Switches for VMware vSAN We’ve covered a lot of ground in the first 3 parts of this series: PART 1: Prerequisites and Hardware Compatibility PART 2: Design for Security, Redundancy, and Scalability PART 3: Sizing for Success But there is a lot more to learn about Memory Tiering. In fact, vSAN often comes up in conversations about Memory Tiering given its similarities, but also due to compatibility inquiries, so let’s dive in. When we first started working with Memory Tiering, the similarities between Memory Tiering and vSAN OSA were quite evident. Both have a multi-tier approach where active data is on fast devices and dormant data is on less expensive devices, thereby helping reduce TCO and the need for expensive devices for dormant data. They are also both deeply integrated into vSphere and are easy to implement. But aside from similarities, there was initially some confusion about compatibility, integration, and having both features enabled at the same time. So, let me answer those questions. Yes, you can have vSAN and Memory Tiering enabled on the same clusters at the same time. The confusion that exists is more around vSAN providing storage to Memory Tiering which is definitely not supported. I’ve covered this before, but I want to reiterate that although both solutions may be using NVMe devices, it does not mean they can share resources. Memory Tiering requires its own physical or logical device strictly for memory allocation. We do not want to share this physical/logical device with anything else including vSAN or other datastores.