In a few recent posts, I’ve been looking at performance counters in vSphere 5.1. One of my colleagues, Hugo Strydom, reached out to me about doing a vCenter Operations (vCOps) custom dashboard to monitor the new Storage I/O Control (SIOC) counters in vSphere 5.1 which I detailed here. Hugo has done a whole series of great blog posts on vCOps on his blog site. I thought it would really cool to get this setup on my environment and take a look.
Folks, This is currently not very clear in the release notes, but if you are already running vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) version 5.1, you do not need to update to VSA 5.1.1. This is not needed, nor is it supported.
Last week I published a blog article about new performance counters in vSphere 5.1 for monitoring Storage I/O Control (SIOC). Soon after publishing, I received a question about the siocActiveTimePercentage counter, which only ever showed 0% or 100% values.
My first introduction to Atlantis ILIO was at a User Group meeting in the UK last year. I had a chat with Jim Moyle who explained the Atlantis ILIO product to me. Their primary focus is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) storage and performance optimization solutions. In a nutshell, the ILIO software appliance sits in the I/O path between your hypervisor and storage and does what is essentially I/O acceleration. Since the appliance sits in the I/O path, it presents an iSCSI or NFS datastore at the front-end to the hypervisor, and at the back-end, it is presented with NFS, iSCSI…
There was an interesting question posted recently around how you could monitor Storage I/O Control activity. Basically, how would one know if SIOC had kicked in and was actively throttling I/O queues? Well, in vSphere 5.1, there are some new performance counters that can help you with that.
There is no doubt that Flash is hot right now. Over the past number of months, we have seen IBM acquire Texas Memory Systems (TMS), HDS unveil their own flash strategy and HP launch their all flash 3PAR P1000 array. Of course regular readers of my blog will have seen my posts about newer all flash array vendors such as Pure Storage, Violin Memory & Nimbus Data. The purpose of this post is to highlight XtremIO’s flash storage solution which was recently acquired by EMC.
Another feature which was introduced in vSphere 5.1 & vCloud Director 5.1 was the interoperability between vCloud Director & Storage DRS. Now vCloud Director can use datastore clusters for the placements of vCloud vApps, and allow Storage DRS do what it does best – choose the best datastore in the datastore cluster for the initial placement of the vApp, and then load balance the capacity and performance of the datastores through the use of Storage vMotion.