One of the most common requests in relation to vSAN performance is how much CPU and memory does vSAN actually consume on an ESXi host, i.e. what is the overhead of running vSAN. Through the vSAN Performance Service, we have been able to show both host and vSAN CPU usage for some time. However, up to now, we have only been able to show host memory usage, and not overhead attributed to vSAN. It has also been extremely difficult to determine how much memory vSAN required. Way back in 2014, with the first vSAN version 5.5 release, I wrote this…
For those of you who may have missed it, vSphere 6.5U1 was released very recently. This new release of vSphere also brought along a new release of vSAN, version 6.6.1. Included in this release are a few really nice features that did not make it into the major 6.6 release of vSAN that we had earlier this year. However some of these features are quite significant, especially as we work to make HCI (hyper-converged infrastructure) more and more easy to deploy, configure and manage.
The folks over at Infinio were kind enough to send me their latest Cache Accelerator I/O Filter so I could set it up in my lab. I must say, this seemed to be the most intuitive of the VAIO plugins (vSphere API for I/O Filters) that I have used to date. In this post, I just want to run run through the deployment of the filter, as opposed to looking at any of the potential performance benefits. If you want an overview of VAIO, have a read of the write-up that I did from VMworld 2014 here. I’ve also looked…
ESXi 6.0 Update 3 is now available. This update is significant for vSAN customers as there are a number of performance related issues addressed. The KB article detailing vSAN performance improvements can be found here, and the ESXi 6.0 U3 release notes can be found here. I wouldn’t necessarily write a blog post to highlight a KB or update release, but I think the improvements that have been made to vSAN performance in this update are very significant. Improvements include enhancements to the way that we do logging. In vSAN, every I/O operation is logged before being processed. We have…
I’m delighted to announce the availability of a new vSphere 6.5 core storage white paper. The paper covers new features such as VMFS-6 enhancements, policy driven Storage I/O Control, policy driven VM Encryption, NFS and iSCSI improvements and of course new limit increases in vSphere 6.5. There are too many VMware folks to thank for putting this paper together, but you’ll find them all listed in the acknowledgements section. I do want to mention one person however; a very special thanks to Cody Hosterman of Pure Storage who spent a lot of time testing many of these new features, and…
Hello from VMworld EMEA in Barcelona. Well, we can finally talk about vSphere 6.5 today. In this post, I want to highlight a number of new and enhanced features that you will find in vSphere 6.5 related to core storage. I am not going to discuss Virtual SAN (VSAN), Virtual Volumes (VVols) or I/O Filter enhancements (VAIO) specifically in this post, although you will no doubt see some new features tie directly into the latter. Instead, I want to talk about those features that are specific to core storage.
I got a bit of a surprise a few weeks back when I noticed a register article by Chris Mellor stating that PrimaryIO (previously CacheBox) had announced a new cache acceleration I/O filter for vSphere. We first announced plans for VAIO (vSphere APIs for I/O Filters) back at VMworld 2014. VAIO allows VMware partners to plug their products/features directly into the VM I/O Path which in turn will give our customers access to 3rd party storage services/features like deduplication, compression, replication or encryption which may not be available on their storage array. Or in this case, a cache acceleration feature.…