VMware vSphere 7 adds NVMe-oF support to speed storage access

Earlier this week we covered the main details of VMware’s blockbuster vSphere 7 launch. In this article we zoom in on VMware’s vSphere 7 support for NVMe over Fabrics for faster data access to external block storage arrays.This support gives virtual machines faster read and write access to external stored data, thus increasing performance. NVMe-oF is the NVMe drive protocol carried over Ethernet or another network fabric. It enables access to a network-linked storage drive as if it were local to the accessing server – in other words, like a direct-accessed NVMe drive IO but cheaper and faster. Latency for the pooled storage is about 100μs instead of the 500μs or more of an all-flash storage array accessed across a File Channel or iSCSI network.