Design Considerations for Storage Controllers in Virtual SAN

Include storage controllers on the hosts of a Virtual SAN cluster that best satisfy the requirements for performance and availability.

• Use storage controller models, and driver and firmware versions that are listed in the VMware Compatibility Guide. Search for Virtual SAN in the VMware Compatibility Guide.
• Use multiple storage controllers, if possible, to improve performance and to isolate a potential controller failure to only a subset of disk groups.
• Use storage controllers that have the highest queue depths in the VMware Compatibility Guide. Using controllers with high queue depth improves performance. For example, when Virtual SAN is rebuilding components after a failure or when a host enters maintenance mode.
• Use storage controllers in passthrough mode for best performance of Virtual SAN. Storage controllers in RAID 0 mode require higher configuration and maintenance efforts compared to storage controllers in passthrough mode.