Systems

Memory tiering and pooled memory are having a moment because they offer the chance to use less RAM

The high price of memory and solid-state storage has almost everyone worried – but not VMware, because the most innovative new feature in the Cloud Foundation 9 (VCF 9) private cloud suite it launched last year is memory tiering tech that allows offload of data from RAM to NVMe drives.

VMware has always promoted VCF 9 memory tiering as offering the chance to reduce infrastructure costs by reducing the amount of RAM needed in new servers, and by creating the opportunity to upgrade the NVMe drives in old boxes and effectively increase their memory capacity. Last week, the Broadcom business unit doubled down on those positions.

Those arguments are of course a little self-serving, because the cost of NVMe storage has also risen. VMware also admits that memory tiering won’t work for every workload and isn’t suitable for latency-sensitive or very large VMs.

But VMware’s memory tiering is currently superior to the alternative Compute Express Link (CXL).

Virtzilla’s customers therefore need to consider VCF 9, especially if pondering the fact that AMD’s and Intel’s most recent releases of manycore CPUs have created an excellent reason to consider a new round of server consolidation. Dell says its customers are replacing seven boxes with one new machine. Intel thinks sixth-gen Xeons allow organizations to consolidate five servers into a single box.

Those new servers can run huge numbers of virtual machines, which concentrate risk, and need massive amounts of expensive memory.

But VMware does not require every host in a cluster to implement memory tiering. VCF 9 therefore means those contemplating a fresh round of server consolidation have a new option to consider as they consider future architectures.

Those contemplations will doubtless include the cost of VCF 9, which comes at a price that often startles users of the vSphere server virtualization products VMware no longer actively sells.

VMware has successfully made the case that VCF 9 represents excellent value for many of its largest customers. However, The Register has heard myriad accounts of vSphere users who feel VCF 9 is uncomfortably expensive. Broadcom’s response to that discomfort is often to make an offer for VCF 9 and tell buyers they can take it or leave it.

Many users walk away. But I hear of plenty who decide they don’t need VCF 9 for all their workloads, adopt the platform for some of their VM fleet, move the rest to another hypervisor and learn to live with multiple virtualization platforms.

I expect high memory prices will mean more organizations decide they can live with a small VCF 9 footprint, and that Broadcom’s results – due this Friday week – will therefore again feature growing revenue and margins from VMware. ®