sddc Archives - Sargon Khizeran

I will be following a Broadcom article (Memory Tiering Configuration) to enable Memory Tiering.

These hosts have not been commissioned into VCF yet, the plan will be prep these as a vSAN cluster.

This is on a SuperMicro E300-9D-8CN8TP and the NVME storage is Samsung 990 PRO 1TB.

Here you can see the amount of physical memory, it’s 128GB

Here is a breakdown of the storage on the host

With a SSH session, place the host in Maintenance Mode

esxcli system maintenanceMode set --enable true

List the NVMe devices on the host

esxcli storage core adapter device list

Copy the full Device UID

Run the following command to create

esxcli system tierdevice create -d /vmfs/devices/disks/<Device UID>

Tun the following command to check the device being claimed by tiering

esxcli system tierdevice list

The next step will be to enable Memory Tiering on the ESX host itself. Because these hosts are managed as standalone, I can go into Advanced Settings and enable it from there.

Filter for ‘tiering’ and you will find other options but the one we want is ‘ VMkernal.Boot.memoryTiering ‘

Highlight, Edit Option, set to True and Save. Reboot the host.

Once the host comes back, we now have a 1:1 ratio of DRAM to NVMe tiering. This can be modified up to 4:1

Set your percentage in ESXi Advanced Host setting ‘ Mem.TierNvmePct ‘ Default value is ‘100’. e.g. If you have 128GB of DRAM and set the value to 200 it would give you 384GB of RAM (256 would be from Tiering)