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myesko
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Should I use NVMe pcie storage driver if VSAN all Flash is SAS

Hello, we recently purchased a Dell vXrail with All Flash drives.  We are running Vmware 6.7 U3,  We are coming from an older vmware 6.0 on older hardware and will be migrating Vms over to the vXrail.

On the old hardware 95% of the vms are using the LSI Logic SAS driver.

Our all Flash drives are Samsung SAS SSD PM1643 Series MZILT7T6HMLA-000D3 

They are SAS not Nvme

Couple questions in regards to the Storage Driver

For new VMs Windows 2016 server - is it ok to use the newer NVME PCIe driver if my flash array is SAS not Nvme, or should i just use the Vmware Paravirtual SCSI driver?  

Is it worth updating my current 2012 Server VMs to use the NVME PCIe driver or Vmware Paravirtual SCSI over the LSI SAS driver or leave it?  Theres seems to be dowtime associated with changing the driver want to make sure its worth it.  

Thanks

Mike

 

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TheBobkin
Champion
Champion

@myesko , This is the VM-level virtual controller not the physical and thus having all-NVMe on the physical layer isn't needed for this to function - that being said, these are designed for faster underlying storage and the guidelines are that these should be All-Flash or better:

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/com.vmware.vsphere.vm_admin.doc/GUID-63E09187-0E75-405...

 

As with any vSCSI controller there is no catch-all to say whether these will suit (and/or benefit) any workload and thus the administrator/owner of these should be testing and comparing with different options and then determining which to go with (and not necessarily the same for all VMs).

 

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myesko
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Good to know that we dont need NVMe on the physical side of things.

So in the end ide like to stadardize a windows 2016 template for all new VMs,  Definitly going to go Vmware Paravirtual SCSI over LSI SAS, but having trouble seeing if NVMe would be better since i have All Flash.

Our VMS are not storage IO intensive, varies from SQL servers, Web Servers, and File Servers.  

Mike

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