Using Intel Optane for NVMe Tiering

 A series of unfortunate events occurred shortly after posting the previous blog post:

• DIMM H1 decided to fail
• Replacement was ordered
• Post office lost the replacement

The joys of homelabbing :) These things happen. While I wait for the replacement for the replacement, a new feature that was introduced in vSphere 8.0 Update 3 was brought to my attention. William Lam posted a blog covering NVMe tiering, currently in tech preview, that allows NVMe devices to act as RAM for inactive pages.

This does mean that I'll need to disrupt my current vSAN deployment. This can be utilized without vCenter. My plan is to utilize one of the NVMe devices to provide effectively triple the RAM that is currently in the system.

As it stands, I have 128GB installed, 112GB usable as H1 left the lobby. By following William Lam's blog, I configured the host with the following commands:

esxcli system settings kernel set -s MemoryTiering -v TRUE

esxcli system tierdevice create -d /vmfs/devices/disks/t10.NVMe____SSDPE21D280GAD_NVME_INTEL_280GB_________0001B33DC1E4D25C

esxcli system settings advanced set -o /Mem/TierNvmePct -i 200

Then rebooted the host. On boot, the increased RAM is realized:

This should provide enough breathing room to attempt a single node VCF deployment. This does change my original plan a little bit, but hopefully I can perform an embedded 5.2 install with supported principal storage. Stay tuned!