One of the most common requests in relation to vSAN performance is how much CPU and memory does vSAN actually consume on an ESXi host, i.e. what is the overhead of running vSAN. Through the vSAN Performance Service, we have been able to show both host and vSAN CPU usage for some time. However, up to now, we have only been able to show host memory usage, and not overhead attributed to vSAN. It has also been extremely difficult to determine how much memory vSAN required. Way back in 2014, with the first vSAN version 5.5 release, I wrote this…
This week I was in Berlin for our annual Tech Summit in EMEA. This is an event for our field folks in EMEA. I presented a number of VSAN sessions, including a design and sizing session. As part of that session, the topic of VSAN memory consumption was raised. In the past, we’ve only ever really talked about the host memory requirements for disk group configuration as highlighted in this post here. For example, as per the post, to a run a fully configured Virtual SAN system, with 5 fully populated disk groups per host, and 7 disks in each…