Many times, the implementation of a particular technology is not enough to realize the full potential of that technology for your business or use cases. Understanding how to deploy something is only half of the battle. Knowing and applying best practices tends to yield better results and avoids timely pitfalls. Below we have listed the best practices when implementing vSAN with RDMA. Our goal is to guide our customers and enable them to make educated decisions based on the years of experience and collaboration that VMware by Broadcom and Dell Technologies have established.

1. Use 100GbE networking for higher demanding workloads to exploit the capabilities of high-performing NVMe devices used by ESA under maximum load.

2. Use higher bandwidth connections versus bonding. A single 100GbE uplink will demonstrate much higher performance than multiple bonded 25GbE links.
3. Monitor network connectivity and performance, as packet loss and retransmits can have a profound impact on performance.
4. Use recommended host BIOS power settings to achieve maximum performance.
5. Leave data compression enabled in vSAN ESA configuration, as it is extremely efficient. (this is enabled by default)
6. Leave the “Number of Disk Stripes per Object” storage policy rule to its default value, as it has limited relevance to VSAN ESA’s new architecture.
7. Run the latest version of vSAN ESA, as vSAN 8 U1 introduced new capabilities that improve performance over the previous versions.
8. Maintain sufficient free capacity, as storage systems often need a minimum amount of capacity to perform their underlying operations.
9. Leverage Dell vSAN Ready Nodes to ensure proper support and alignment of NIC device + Firmware + Drivers + ESXi listed in the vSAN VCG.
10. vSAN ESA supports up to 100G speeds only, as there are no 200G NICs listed on the vSAN VCG today.