I believe I found part of the reason for the conflict.    Despite addressing vSphere 5 later in the technical report, TR3749 states the following in the Document Roadmap section on page 6:

"This document, TR-3749, is the main document in a set of documents from NetApp covering virtualization
on NetApp, specifically with VMware products. This document is specifically in reference to VMware
vSphere 4."

With that being said, I'm pretty comfortable moving forward with the vSphere 5.5 recommendations in the KB article rather than the Netapp Storage Best Practices for VMware vSphere.  

On Mon, Dec 29, 2014 at 11:50 AM, Philbert Rupkins <philbertrupkins@gmail.com> wrote:
Toasters,

It appears the following documents conflict with one another when it comes to recommendations for the value of Net.TcpipHeapMax in ESXi.   

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How to configure VMware vSphere 5.x for Data ONTAP 7.3 and 8.x
https://kb.netapp.com/support/index?page=content&id=1013275

Net.TcpipHeapMax

For vSphere 5.0/5.1 set 128

For vSphere 5.5 set 512

TR3749 - NetApp Storage Best Practices for VMWare vSphere
http://www.netapp.com/us/media/tr-3749.pdf

"While the NetApp best practice remains to set Net.TcpipHeapMax at the maximum value of 128MB, tests have shown ESXi 5 to be less sensitive to depletion of TCP/IP heap memory."

 ----------------------------

It seems that TR3749 may be out of date (last update 2011) as it doesnt distinguish between vSphere 5.0/5.1 and 5.5.   To my knowledge, the 128MB maximum TCP/IP heap size is applicable to vsphere 5.0 and 5.1.    I believe 5.5 increases this maximum to 512MB.   

I assume the current recommendation for vSphere 5.5 against a filer running ONTAP 8.1.4 7-Mode is 512MB.   Can somebody confirm?   Is there a best practices doc like TR3749 for vSphere 5.5 in a 7-mode environment?

Thanks,
Phil