Network Interface Cards (NICs) used in vSAN hosts must meet certain requirements. vSAN works on 10 Gbps, 25 Gbps, 40 Gbps, 50 Gbps, and 100 Gbps networks.

vSAN deployments must ensure that the minimum NIC requirements are met.

Table 1. Minimum NIC Requirements and Recommendations
Topology or Deployment Mode Architecture Support for 1 GbE NIC Support for 10 GbE NIC Support for NICs Greater than 10 GbE Inter-Node Latency Inter-Site Link Bandwidth or Latency Latency Between Nodes and vSAN Witness Hosts Bandwidth Between Nodes and vSAN Witness Hosts
Standard Cluster Hybrid Cluster Yes (Minimum) Yes (Recommended) Yes Less than 1 ms RTT. NA NA NA
All-Flash Cluster No Yes Yes (Recommended)
Stretched Cluster Hybrid or All-Flash Cluster No Yes (Minimum) Yes Less than 1 ms RTT within each site. Recommended is 10 GbE (Workload Dependent) and 5 ms RTT or less. Less than 200 ms RTT. Up to 10 hosts per site. 2 Mbps per 1000 components (Maximum of 100 Mbps with 45 k components).
Less than 100 ms RTT. 11–15 hosts per site.
Two-Host Cluster Hybrid Cluster Yes (Up to 10 VMs) Yes (Recommended) Yes Less than 1 ms RTT within the same site. Recommended is 10 GbE and 5 ms RTT or less. Less than 500 ms RTT. 2 Mbps per 1000 components (Maximum of 1.5 Mbps).
All-Flash Cluster No Yes (Minimum)
Note: These NIC requirements assume that the packet loss is not more than 0.0001% in the hyper-converged environments. There can be a drastic impact on the vSAN performance, if any of these requirements are exceeded.

For more information on the stretched cluster NIC requirements, see vSAN Stretched Cluster Guide.