This blog is written by Dell Hypervisor Engg.
Persistent Memory(also known as Non Volatile Memory (NVM)) is a random access memory type which retains it’s contents even when system power goes down in the event of an unexpected power loss, user initiated shutdown, system crash etc. Dell EMC introduced support for NVDIMM-N from their 14th generation of PowerEdge servers. VMware announced support for NVDIMM-N from vSphere ESXi 6.7 onwards. The NVDIMM-N resides in a standard CPU Memory slot, placing data closer to the processor thus reducing the latency and fetch maximum performance. This document detail about the support stance of NVDIMM-N and VMware ESXi specific to Dell EMC PowerEdge servers. This paper provides an insight into the usecases where NVDIMM is involved and the behavior caveats of the same.
Dell EMC started supporting PMem (also known as Non-volatile Memory (NVM)) from their 14th generation of PowerEdge server release onwards. However, VMware introduced their support of NVDIMM from vSphere 6.7 release. Refer to section "Server Hardware Configuration" in NVDIMM-N user guide to know the PowerEdge server models that supports NVDIMM-N. The server support matrix is same for VMware ESXi as well. The hardware and firmware requirements for NVDIMM-N to function properly in ESXi is documented in the user guide. Dell EMC highly recommend customers to go through the user guide before getting started with NVDIMM-N.
Refer to Dell EMC whitepaper to know about the usecases, utilities available to monitor and manage NVDIMM-N on VMware ESXi.