System designers need to understand the pros and cons of every VME bus standard available before implementing them in a new product. Although introduced in 2004, there has been little written about 2eSST, the highest performing VME bus standard. It can be used today in critical embedded systems for large performance gains without any significant change to system architecture. High end, critical embedded systems make use of multiple processors, distributed memory, and multiple I/O cards which requires large backplane bandwidth. Designers can choose to upgrade the VME bus performance with 2eSSt or adopt one of the new serial based interconnect standards. Creating, verifying, and trouble shooting a robust, deterministic interconnect between the distributed compute elements is a different challenge than creating a network between PC motherboards. The best solution for critical embedded systems cannot result in dropped packets, retries or processors running large protocol termination stacks. Tundra’s Tsi148, a VME to PCI-X bridge and VMETRO’s Vanguard VME Analyzer are the tools that can create next generation VME products.