Let’s be honest, trying to scale virtual workloads by just jamming more and more expensive DRAM into servers is completely dead. It’s an inefficient, unsustainable approach, and frankly, a budget killer.
That’s why I’m so excited about memory tiering in general. This isn’t just a tweak; it’s a fundamental architectural shift. We’re moving beyond the single-pool memory model to intelligently manage data across different performance tiers—balancing raw speed with serious cost efficiency. The takeaway for you is huge: you gain the ability to run significantly more virtual machines on the infrastructure you already own, meeting your capacity goals at a fraction of the traditional cost. So, if the economic benefits are massive, why isn’t everyone doing it? Well, even with all the upside, adopting memory tiering has been surprisingly slow, mostly because of real operational concerns:
Therefore I would like to inform you about Enhanced Memory Tiering!
There’s always room for improvement, and I’m genuinely excited about the useful capabilities added in this release. First and foremost is the implementation with Zero Downtime: you can achieve seamless adoption with reboot-free enablement, allowing you to activate memory tiering without any cluster downtime.
This new release also features Built-in Resilience. From now on you can enable mirroring based on software (instead of only support for hardware RAID), which delivers improved availability and essential resiliency for your infrastructure.
For infrastructure optimizers, a seriously cool addition in VCF Operations is the ability to Optimize with Observability. This powerful feature elevates performance analysis by introducing enhanced “what if” observability. It gives you crystal-clear visibility into memory tiering across all your hosts and clusters, which is crucial for continuous resource optimization.
And implementation is also improved.
What makes this capability a true game-changer is how it complements detailed performance metrics with VCF’s full-stack infrastructure observability, which spans compute, storage, and network components.
This unified view is integral for driving efficient troubleshooting, allowing you to quickly identify root causes and reduce your Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).
I’ve been exploring this feature in VCF Operations 9.1 and I’m really excited about its potential. Curious to see it for yourself? Check out the video below!
More insight:
In case you want zo zie more details about the distribution, there is also a button called “How is the NVME storage distributed among hosts”
And when you hit this button, you receive a structured overview like below:
You might have noticed there is a “How to Activate button” , by clicking on this button you will receive clear instruction and the “Learn” which will guide you to related Techdocs.
Final thoughts
With Enhanced Memory Tiering in VCF Operations 9.1, the previous operational concerns are gone, thanks to Zero Downtime enablement and crucial Observability tools. The technical hurdles are cleared, leaving only massive economic benefits. The time to intelligently optimize your infrastructure is now and don’t hesitate by using the tooling which can support you with this!
End of this post.
Disclaimer: Please note that the views expressed in this blog are solely my own and should be treated as personal opinions. This content does not hold any legal or authoritative standing.