OTOH, a FreeNAS VM on the same machine might (?) be bottlenecked by its own VMXNet3 virtual NIC. I can passthru the whole NVME drive to FreeNAS and give it dedicated (reserved) RAM on the holst, and I'm willing to work with write back caching mode for my applications. It may be overkill for my applications: I'm still only planning on using the one NVME drive! But, FreeNAS appears to have a stack of useful features: Efficient deduplication and RAM caching. Of course, Windows does file caching itself, but that's very RAM inefficient (doesn't take advantage of the heavy reduduncy between the VM's, and doesn't help with reboots). In Workstation’s release notes they mention this: Virtual NVMe support Workstation 14 Pro introduces a new virtual NVMe storage controller for improved guest operating system performance on Host SSD drives and support for testing VMware vSAN.
![nvme performance in vm esxi 6.5 nvme performance in vm esxi 6.5](https://cdn.statically.io/img/www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/https-vmgu-ru-content_images-vmware-vsphere-7-u1.png)
My college and fellow vExpert Jesper Alberts encountered the same problem with his Supermicro X9DRL-iF and Samsung 970. In VMware’s latest Workstation 14 release, they’ve announced support for a new disk type: virtual NVMe. I Have the following NVMe SSD disks in the hosts: Samsung SSD 970 EVO 1TB NVMe.
#Nvme performance in vm esxi 6.5 update#
With efficient deduplication I could run them all out of system RAM but Esxi apparently only supports very small RAM caches. After upgrading my hosts from VMware ESXi 6.7 Update 3 to VMware ESXi 7, the NVMe SSDs are not recognized anymore. Typical VHD size is < 100GB, but that is heavily duplicated across the VM's. I'm evaluating FreeNAS as a VM on the same host.
![nvme performance in vm esxi 6.5 nvme performance in vm esxi 6.5](https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/word-image-69.png)
I'm experimenting with increasing the responsiveness of the VM's, including reboot times. I have a large amount of ECC RAM (by home lab standards, or at least my own)- 256 GB- and am not CPU limited either for typical usage. The VM's currently all use virtual NVME controllers to talk the their VHD's on the datastore. I have a stable Esxi 6.5 host running with a small SSD boot drive and a 1TB Samsung 960 Evo for the datastore, running half dozen windows VM's for a home lab.