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Kelv1nW
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Virtual Flash Cache - vCenter 6.7 HTML5 UI...

Hi Folks

I've upgraded a vCenter to 6.7 and we've started to use the new HTML5 UI.. But for the life of me, I can't find the "Virtual Flash Resource Management" to define a new SSD to use as a Cache.

Has this been implemented in the HTML5 Interface? Or do I need to stick with the Flash UI for this?

Thanks

Kelvin

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TheBobkin
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Hello Kelvin,

Welcome to Communities.

You are not searching aimlessly, unfortunately this feature is not (currently) present in the HTML5 Client - out of personal interest I will *try* and find out out whether this is pending and or not being implemented but I will give disclaimer that I likely will not be able to divulge said info unless I have something public.

So for now it is Flash Client or CLI+MOB for configuring such devices.

Bob

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TheBobkin
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Hello Kelvin,

Welcome to Communities.

You are not searching aimlessly, unfortunately this feature is not (currently) present in the HTML5 Client - out of personal interest I will *try* and find out out whether this is pending and or not being implemented but I will give disclaimer that I likely will not be able to divulge said info unless I have something public.

So for now it is Flash Client or CLI+MOB for configuring such devices.

Bob

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Kelv1nW
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Thanks Bob, I thought I was going nuts!

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TheBobkin
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Just to close the loop on this for anyone interested and was not aware:

VMware ESXi 6.7 Update 2 Release Notes

Product Support Notices

  • VMware vSphere Flash Read Cache is being deprecated. While this feature continues to be supported in the vSphere 6.7 generation, it will be discontinued in a future vSphere release. As an alternative, you can use the vSAN caching mechanism or any VMware certified third-party I/O acceleration software listed in the VMware Compatibility Guide.

Bob

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Crinos512
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Any idea as to the rational of removing it from 6.7?

All of the following seem to be great ideas if you have some SSDs available to populate free spots in your host(s).

(Quoted from About Virtual Flash Resource )

The following vSphere functionalities require the virtual flash resource:

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daphnissov
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It just wasn't a well-adopted feature because it's read-only cache and features like vSAN make it obsolete. It was also tricky to size and had some rather unfortunate bugs plague its presence. I just never saw much of it in production.

Crinos512
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Fair enough, and I can see how it would be beneficial to use flash SANs to cache the vCenter environment as a whole, however it seems logical that you would want to have as an option flash caching at the host level to maximize SSDs that are local to that host instead of requiring implementation of a vSAN (which can be thought of as essentially a RAID of shared disk space where each individual host's shared space can be considered as a member drive) in order to use any host/IO caching. Using vSAN caching it would be possible that you could be caching local IO or host swap with remote flash resources... which would be limited by network bandwidth.

Rather than pointing out the bugs and configuration issues as a reason to discontinue it I would think VMware would focus on refining it to make it easier to use and less buggy, perhaps even considering implementing Virtual Flash Cache as a stand alone ESXi option as single server environments would benefit greatly from it, and cannot, obviously, use a vSAN.

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VIRTUNET2011101
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Even though VFRC is deprecated in ESXi 7. The VMware API for IO filters (VAIO) which allows third parties like us to develop host side caching software for VMware continues to exist in 7.0 and our host side caching software (VirtuCache) uses this framework.

Here is a link on how VirtuCache compares with VFRC. Disclosure: I am a SE with Virtunet.

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