vSAN 8.0 ESA – Network Performance Test Displays Blue Info Icon Instead of Green Passed Icon

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

When running the vSAN Network Performance Test in vSAN 8.0 ESA (Express Storage Architecture),
the Health Status may display a blue “Info” icon, rather than the green “Passed” icon or yellow "Warning"observed in vSAN OSA environments.

1 vSAN ESA:


2 vSAN OSA:

Environment

vSAN 8.0

Cause

In vSAN ESA, the system displays a blue info icon whenever traffic is detected during the test.
This differs from the behavior in vSAN OSA, where traffic throughput is used to determine whether the status should appear as green, yellow, or red.

This behavior is expected and reflects differences in design and network requirements between the vSAN ESA and vSAN OSA architectures.

 

Resolution

The difference in UI behavior is related to architectural distinctions and network requirements:

• vSAN OSA supports 1 GbE and 10 GbE physical NICs.
  Throughput thresholds are therefore used to determine the health state.
• vSAN ESA, however, requires a minimum of 10 GbE, and throughput is generally expected to be high across supported hardware.
  Because of this, ESA does not emphasize throughput thresholds during the Network Performance Test.

For ESA, the primary goal of the test is to confirm that network traffic is flowing, not to grade performance against minimum thresholds.

The following logic is used for the Network Performance Test:

vSAN OSA

• Red – 0 Mb/s
• Yellow – < 850 Mb/s
• Green – ≥ 850 Mb/s

vSAN ESA

• Red – 0 Mb/s
• Blue – > 0 Mb/s

This design ensures that ESA clusters focus on connectivity validation rather than throughput scoring.

 

Additional Information

For general vSAN networking requirements, see:

Networking Requirements for vSAN

vSAN -- Health Service -- Proactive Tests -- Network Performance Test