HP MEM module, stable now

[Kevin Trinkner]

Wondering who is all using the HP MEM driver (12.6) in esxi 6.0 and later realeses?

Reading through older posts it sounded like the HP MEM module was a nightmare, so I'm wondering if it is any more reliable at this point?

Are there real performance advantages of running this over the proven Round Robin method?

Thanks for the help

[Stor_Mort]

VMware did fix an issue that caused MEM instability when they released 5.5u3. 6.0 also contains the fix. Be sure your NIC drivers and firmware are up to date as listed in the HPE VMware recipe at 

http://vibsdepot.hpe.com/hpq/recipes/HPE-VMware-Recipe.pdf

As you might expect, the question about whether the MEM provides a significant performance boost depends on your configuration. It will have the greatest benefit with fast disk drives like SSD, more than 2 storage nodes and dedicated hardware nodes rather than VSA. This is because MEM removes some network latency and places more stress on the storage back-end. Ultimately, the performance of your hard drives sets the upper performance limit of the system.

[BadHabit]

Hi,

I tried the MEM once together with ESXi6 and indeed it was a nightmare.

Also I couldn´t find if it is a supported configuration together with Guest-Clustering and shared RDMs between VMs. RoundRobin is supported by VMWare, but with the MEM the clusternodes partly locked the disks and never came up again... 

Regards

[Stor_Mort]

You must leave the load balancing setting as the MEM configures it. Changing it to round-robin will indeed confuse it badly.