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According to VMware vSAN host design guidelines best practices indicate that it is absolutely critical to
provide more bandwidth for vSAN traffic to improve performance:
• If you plan to use hosts that have 1-GbE adapters, dedicate adapters for vSAN only. For all-flash configurations, plan hosts that
have dedicated or shared 10-GbE adapters.
• If you plan to use 10-GbE adapters, they can be shared with other traffic types for both hybrid and all-flash configurations
• If a 10-GbE adapter is shared with other traffic types, use a vSphere Distributed Switch for vSAN traffic to isolate the traffic by using
Network I/O Control and VLANs.
• Create a team of physical adapters for vSAN traffic for redundancy.
VMware vSAN deployments on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers and Broadcom NetXtreme Ethernet adapters
are a proven, typical use case for Dell EMC customers. VMware vSAN enables Hyperconverged
infrastructures (HCI) for business critical business applications such as Oracle, Exchange and SAP with
Enterprise reliability, security and performance. These mission-critical applications running on VMware vSAN
easily increase their performance through the benefit from 10/25Gb Ethernet speeds without the need to
update any other hardware or any software.
25Gb Ethernet Performance Testing
HCIBench Results
Applications running on VMware vSAN will
see immediate results moving from 1Gb to
10Gb Ethernet speeds. Using four
PowerEdge R740xd servers and
Broadcom’s 10/25Gb NetXtreme Ethernet
adapters, VMware vSAN demonstrated
tremendous perform improvements with
the HCIBench benchmarking tool. In our
proof of concept testing actual results
below have showed 10Gb throughput
increasing up to 46 times compared to that
of 1Gb. Moreover, 25Gb showed another
21% increase in throughput improvement over 10Gb
i
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See Immediate Results with 10/25Gb Storage IOPS
On the storage front, deployments that
leverage Dell EMC PowerEdge Servers
and Broadcom NetXtreme 10/25Gb
Ethernet adapters will see immediate
storage performance results on VMware
vSAN when moving from 1Gb to 10Gb.
Storage IOPS improves up to 14 times
with 10Gb Ethernet versus 1Gb.
Moreover, 25Gb Ethernet demonstrated
another 15% in IOPS performance over
10Gb.
Conclusion
Dell EMC PowerEdge servers coupled
with Broadcom NetXtreme 10/25Gb
Ethernet solutions provide the building
blocks to simplify deployment and speed scaling with unmatched performance. To increase performance,
customers simply need to move their network from 1Gb to 10Gb thus increasing throughput and storage
IOPS. The move to 10/25Gb Ethernet speeds translates to increased application performance along with
better utilization and scaling of existing compute power and storage performance. This testing is clear that
vSAN deployments would significantly benefit from upgrading from 1Gb to 10/25Gb speed
i
Performance results based on internal Dell EMC / Broadcom testing conducted Feb 2019 Ref #19000041