Storage I/O Control (SIOC) was initially introduced in vSphere 4.1 to provide I/O prioritization of virtual machines running on a cluster of ESXi hosts that had access to shared storage. It extended the familiar constructs of shares and limits, which existed for CPU and memory, to address storage utilization through a dynamic allocation of I/O queue slots across a cluster of ESXi servers. The purpose of SIOC is to address the ‘noisy neighbour’ problem, i.e. a low priority virtual machine impacting other higher priority virtual machines due to the nature of the application and its I/O running in that low priority VM.
The following are the new enhancements to Storage I/O Control in vSphere 5.1.
1. Stats Only Mode
[Updated May 2014] SIOC has a new feature called Stats Only Mode. SIOC Stats Only Mode was originally planned to have been turned on automatically, but it appears that is was disabled at the last-minute in the vSphere 5.1 release. When enabled, it doesn’t enforce throttling but gathers statistics to assist Storage DRS. Storage DRS now has statistics in advance for new datastores being added to the datastore cluster & can get up to speed on the datastores profile/capabilities much quicker than before.
2. Automatic Threshold Computation
The default latency threshold for SIOC is 30 msecs. Not all storage devices are created equal so this default is set to a middle-of-the-ground range. There are certain devices which will hit their natural contention point earlier than others, e.g. SSDs, in which case the threshold should be lowered by the user. However, manually determining the correct latency can be difficult for users. This motivates the need for the latency threshold to get automatically determined at a correct level for each device. Another enhancement to SIOC is that SIOC is now turned on in stats only mode. This means that interesting statistics which are only presented when SIOC is enabled will now be available immediately.
When peak throughput is measured, latency is also measured.
The latency threshold value at which Storage I/O Control will kick in is then set to 90% of this peak value (by default).
vSphere administrators can change this 90% to another percentage value or they can still input a millisecond value if they so wish.
3. VMobservedLatency
I am a big fan of Storage I/O Control. I wrote a myth-busting article about it on the vSphere Storage blog some time back. I’d urge you all to try it out if you are in a position to do so.