Using the "Memory Tiering over NVMe" feature in vSphere 8.0 Update 3.

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

"Memory tiering over NVMe" is a new feature in Technical Preview that allows users to add memory capacity to a host by using NVMe devices that are installed locally in the host.

The feature utilizes the NVMe devices as tiered memory and reduces the impact to performance by intelligently choosing which VM memory locations should be stored in the slower NVMe device vs faster DRAM in the host.

This Technical Preview allows the users to try out the feature even though some functionality is not yet available and performance tuning is not yet complete for all supported workloads. Refer to the attachment enclosed for pre-requisites, configuration and best practices for using this feature as a Technical Preview.

 

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0 Update 3

Resolution

The fully functional feature will be available in a future release.

 

When using this feature in Technical Preview:

1. Users should know the pre-requisites of "Memory Tiering over NVMe", including requirements for the cluster setup, host setup, and workloads being run on the host and within the cluster.
2. Users should know how to enable the feature.
3. Users should know which NVMe devices are are supported.
4. Users should know which workload types are supported.
5. Users should know how to check if the feature is enabled and how to view performance metrics related to the feature.