vSphere 7.0 Update 2 and above started supporting RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) communication. RDMA allows direct memory access from one computer system memory to another without consuming host CPU cycles. Rather, it is offloaded to the RDMA capable NIC devices present in these hosts. This guide provides details on configuring RDMA on a vSAN cluster (OSA/ESA) end to end so that better performance can be achieved. This guide focuses on Broadcom based Network Interface Cards (NIC) enabled with RDMA. It doesn’t cover Mellanox based Network cards.

We will also cover some of the advantages the vSAN ESA architecture has over the previous OSA architecture. Then, we will provide some use case examples to help guide customers in determining where they might leverage this technology to help improve storage performance and efficiency with business-critical workloads.