We had a discussion internally about ESX/ESXi caching I/Os. In particular this discussion was around caching of writes as a customer was concerned about consistency of their data. I fully understand that they are concerned and I know in the past some vendors were doing write caching however VMware does not do this for obvious reasons. Although performance is important it is worthless when your data is corrupt / inconsistent. Of course I looked around for data to back this claim up and bust this myth once and for all. I found a KB article that acknowledges this and have a quote from one of our VMFS engineers.
Source Satyam Vaghani (VMware Engineering)
ESX(i) does not cache guest OS writes. This gives a VM the same crash consistency as a physical machine: i.e. a write that was issued by the guest OS and acknowledged as successful by the hypervisor is guaranteed to be on disk at the time of acknowledgement. In other words, there is no write cache on ESX to talk about, and so disabling it is moot. So that’s one thing out of our way.Source – Knowledge Base
VMware ESX acknowledges a write or read to a guest operating system only after that write or read is acknowledged by the hardware controller to ESX. Applications running inside virtual machines on ESX are afforded the same crash consistency guarantees as applications running on physical machines or physical disk controllers.