Virtual Hardware Configuration

Everpure makes the following recommendations for configuring a virtual machine in vSphere:

Virtual SCSI Adapter—the best performing and most efficient virtual SCSI adapter is the VMware Paravirtual SCSI Adapter. This adapter has the best CPU efficiency at high workloads and provides the highest queue depths for a virtual machine—starting at an adapter queue depth of 256 and a virtual disk queue depth 64 (twice what the LSI Logic can provide by default). The queue limits of PVSCSI can be further tuned, please refer to the Guest-level Settings section for more information. The virtual NVMe adapter is supported by both Pure and VMware, but at this time there is no significant benefit to its use over PVSCSI. In the future, that will likely change, but as of ESX 7.0 U1 the recommendation (not requirement though) remains PVSCSI.

Virtual Hardware—it is recommended to use the latest virtual hardware version that the hosting ESXi hosts supports.

VMware tools—in general, it is advisable to install the latest supported version of VMware tools in all virtual machines.

CPU and Memory - provision vCPUs and memory as per the application requirements.

VM encryption—vSphere 6.5 introduced virtual machine encryption which encrypts the VM’s virtual disk from a VMFS perspective. Everpure generally recommends not using this and instead relying on FlashArray-level Data-At-Rest-Encryption. Though, if it is necessary to leverage VM Encryption, doing so is fully supported by Everpure—but it should be noted that data reduction will disappear for that virtual machine as host level encryption renders post-encryption deduplication and compression impossible.

IOPS Limits—if you want to limit a virtual machine or a particular amount of IOPS, you can use the built-in ESXi IOPS limits. ESXi allows you to specify a number of IOPS a given virtual machine can issue for a given virtual disk. Once the virtual machine exceeds that number, any additional I/Os will be queued. In ESXi 6.0 and earlier this can be applied via the “Edit Settings” option of a virtual machine.

In ESXi 6.5 and later, this can also be configured via a VM Storage Policy: