NVMe Memory Tiering Design and Sizing on VMware Cloud Foundation 9 Part 5: Deployment Scenarios (Greenfield, Brownfield, Nested Lab)

Greenfield Deployments Brownfield Deployments Lab Deployments Discover more from VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Blog Related Articles NVMe Memory Tiering Design and Sizing on VMware Cloud Foundation 9 Part 5: Deployment Scenarios (Greenfield, Brownfield, Nested Lab) NVMe Memory Tiering Design and Sizing on VMware Cloud Foundation 9 Part 4: vSAN Compatibility and Storage Considerations NVMe Memory Tiering Design and Sizing on VMware Cloud Foundation 9 Part 3: Sizing for Success In this part of the blog series, I want to provide some information about the differences when enabling Memory Tiering in different scenarios. Although the core process remains the same, there are things that may require extra attention and planning to save some time and effort. When we talk about greenfield scenarios, we refer to brand new VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) deployments including new hardware and new configuration for the whole stack. Brownfield scenarios will cover configuring Memory Tiering on an existing VCF environment. Lastly, I do want to include lab scenarios as I have seen mixed statements that this is not supported, but I will cover this at the end of this blog post. Let’s start with the configuration process of greenfield environments. In Part 4 , I covered how VMware vSAN and Memory Tiering are compatible and can co-exist in the same cluster. I’ve also highlighted something important that you should be aware of during greenfield deployments of VCF. As of VCF 9.0, enabling Memory Tiering is a “Day 2” operation, meaning that you first configure VCF and then you can configure Memory Tiering, but during the VCF deployment workflow, you will notice there is no option to enable Memory Tiering (yet), but you can enable vSAN. How you handle your NVMe device dedicated for Memory Tiering will dictate the steps necessary to get that device presented for its configuration. If all the NVMe devices for both vSAN and Memory Tiering are present during the VCF deployment, chances are vSAN may auto-claim all of the drives (including the NVMe device you have allocated for Memory Tiering). In this case you would have to remove the drive from vSAN post-configuration, erase partitions and then start your Memory Tiering configuration.