vSphere 7.0 - New Features (VM NVMe Defaults and Shared VMDK disks)
This post looks at some of the differences / new features for VMs in vSphere 7.0.
When creating a new VM vCenter still defaults to Server 2012 R2 for some reason! With this you get the typical setup, E1000 and LSI SAS scsi controller etc:
Now if we choose Server 2016 we start to see a change here. VMware vSphere 7.0 now point you towards the NVMe (NVM Express) Controller by default. This is certainly a change. Pity they leave the E1000 as the default network driver! So, the NVMe Controller is a play which moves beyond the Paravirtual Storage Controller Driver which I use for specialised VMs that were heavy on storage - SQL, Exchange etc. Currently it's not NVMe all the way down the SCSI stack but maybe in future versions - we'll see what way that plays out in the next year or two I guess.
This is Server 2019 and it also uses NVMe as the default Storage Controller with E1000 again for the networking.
Note: For this and Server 2016 that 90GB is the default OS Disk Size, it used to be 60GB.
So you can now use Shared VMDK Disks instead of RDMs for Windows Failover Clusters as in this version VMware added SCSI-3 support at the VMDK level. There is a path to migrate RDMs - here is the link:
https://storagehub.vmware.com/t/vsphere-7-core-storage/shared-vmdk/
There are a few caveats - like for me Lab that is - it's supported on Fibre Channel arrays ONLY!! Not something I have lying around currently.....! I checked the Datastore properties but the "Clustered VMDK" option is not present on my system. Looks interesting though, maybe they will extend it to iSCSI at some point? Sorry I can't go into it in more detail here though......!
