I am in Australia this week for the Sydney and Melbourne VMUG UserCon’s. Had a bunch of meetings yesterday and this morning the news was dropped that Intel Optane support was released for vSAN. The performance claims look great, 2.5x more IOPS and 2.5x less latency. (I don’t know the test specifics yet.) On top of that, Optane typically has a higher endurance rating, meaning that the device can incur a lot more writes, which makes it an ideal device for the vSAN caching layer.
While talking to customers the past couple of days though it was clear to me that performance is one thing, but flexibility of configuration is much more important. With vSAN you have the ability to select any server from the vSphere HCL and pick the components you want as long as they are on the vSAN HCL. Or you can simply pick a ready node and swap components as needed. As long as the controller remains the same for a ready node you can do that. Either way, you have choice, and now with Optane being certified you can use the latest in flash technology with vSAN!
Oh for those paying attention, the Intel P4800X Optane device isn’t listed on the HCL yet. The database is being updated as we speak, and the device should be included soon!
MrTaliz says
I’m not that impressed with Optane. It does around 2,5GB/s. There are NVMe devices that do 3,2GB/s…
Hopefully it will get better though. Competition is always good.
Paul says
The beauty of Optane is the low queue depth numbers. Typical NAND needs the queue depth to be 32 for sustain IOPS numbers where Optane can operate at queue depth of 1 or 2 and still blast out the performance on an NVMe.
Tom says
It’s on the HCL now, as well… http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/detail.php?deviceCategory=ssd&productid=41405&deviceCategory=ssd&details=1&vsan_type=vsanssd&ssd_partner=46&keyword=p4800x&vsanrncomp=true&page=1&display_interval=500&sortColumn=Partner&sortOrder=Asc
ghost2512 says
Will not be the 10gbps Ethernet a limiting factor with these ssd? 10gbps will throughput 1250MB/s, but a 2 drive group with optane could do 4,8GB/s… But VMware says that vsan loose only 5% raw performance… Something sound strange
Robert Zarate says
Duncan,
I noticed the Intel Optane P4800X is listed for all three tiers on the HCL (All flash caching, All flash Capacity and hybrid caching). When I looked at the new P4600, it is only listed for All flash caching and All flash capacity. I would guess this is a typo since the previous model, Intel P3700 is listed for all three tiers. Customers are starting to want to swap out their older P3700 cards and if they have a hybrid setup right now, they are asking questions on what the “issue” is with the P4600 HCL. Can you dig into a reason for this, please?
The Optane cards are awesome, but they are limited in size right now. Optane will get bigger, but the price will probably be much higher also.