VMware Cloud on AWS uses VMware vSAN storage, allowing storage resources attached directly to hosts to be used for distributed storage and accessed by multiple other hosts. Follow the recommendations in this section for the best performance.
For additional information about vSAN performance, see the white paper vSAN 6.6 Performance Improvements (though written for vSAN 6.6, much of the content is still relevant). Note also that VMware Cloud on AWS uses all-flash vSAN storage, so recommendations about hybrid vSAN wouldn’t apply.
For the best performance virtual machines should be distributed relatively evenly across vSAN hosts. VMware DRS can help to achieve this (see VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)).
RAID-5 and RAID-6 (also known collectively as erasure coding) can provide data protection, but with a performance penalty. RAID-1 (mirroring) offers the best performance, but at the cost of significantly lower space efficiency.
Erasure coded storage performs better on i3en.metal than on i3.metal. This is because while the former performs compression, the latter performs both compression and deduplication.
For further information about vSAN performance with erasure coding, see the white paper vSAN 6.6 Performance Improvements (though written for vSAN 6.6, much of the content is still relevant).
For more details about vSAN configuration options and other vSAN performance tips, see the white paper VMware vSAN Network Design.
