5.6.4.5 Network Speed Requirements
vSAN supports the following configurations:
• Hybrid vSAN configurations support 1-Gb or 10-Gb Ethernet for network uplinks. Depending on usage, the amount of activity on the vSAN might overwhelm a 1-Gb network and might be the limiting factor in I/O-intensive environments, such as the following:
o Rebuild and synchronization operations
o Highly-intensive disk operations, such as cloning a VM
o High-density environments with a large number of VMs
• All-flash vSAN configurations are supported only when using 10-Gb Ethernet network uplinks. The improved performance with an all-flash configuration consumes significantly more network bandwidth due to the increased speed of the disks in the configuration.
A 10-GbE network is required to achieve the highest performance (IOPS). Without it, a significant decrease in vSAN performance can be expected. For this reason, VMware recommends a 10-Gb Ethernet connection for use with vSAN in all production configurations.