• New processors – 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors power latest-generation Dell EMC PowerEdge R650 servers and can potentially deliver more cores per processor than previous generations of Intel Xeon processors

• Robust memory capacity – Up to 2 TB of RDIMM or 4 TB of LRDIMM memory

• All-flash PCIe NVMe storage – The latest generation server supports up to 153 TB of storage from 12 2.5-inch NVMe SSDs
  • NVMe drives can handle more operations per second than SATA SSDs to offer faster storage access and increased bandwidth
  • Support for higher-speed PCIe NVMe, which doubles the throughput per PCIe slot compared to older generation servers
    
    
• Remote direct memory access (RDMA) – IT admins can now enable this feature for vSAN clusters
  • For more information, see the callout section below “What is RDMA?”
    
    
• New versions of VMware vSphere – We installed version 7.0 Update 2 of the hypervisor on the latest- generation servers, the first version of vSphere that supports vSAN RDMA

What is RDMA?

RDMA allows servers connected in a network to trade data by accessing each other’s memory directly and without involving the servers’ OS, processors, or cache. Enabling RDMA can help improve workload performance as well as each server’s throughput because CPU resources can focus more on processing workload queries rather than those requests to trade data. RDMA was not available for vSAN configurations of the Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 and R630 servers at the time of our previous testing, so we could not enable the setting for those solutions.