By Mark Ma
With the release of vSphere 6.7, VMware added iSER (iSCSI Extensions for RDMA) as a native supported storage protocol to ESXi. With iSER run over iSCSI, users can boost their vSphere performance just by replacing the regular NICs with RDMA-capable NICs. RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) allows the transfer of memory from one computer to another. This is a direct transfer and minimizes CPU/kernel involvement. By bypassing the kernel, we get extremely high I/O bandwidth and low latency. (To use RDMA, you must have an HCA/Host Channel Adapter device on both the source and destination.) In this blog, we compare standard iSCSI performance vs. iSER performance to see how iSER can release the full potential of your iSCSI storage.