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…
I took the opportunity last week (while I was over in the Boston area) to catch up with Scott Davis. I’ve known Scott a long time, as he had various roles at VMware over a number of years. Scott is currently CTO at Infinio, a company that has developed an I/O acceleration product for virtual machines. The new version of Infinio Accelerator 2.0 released only a few weeks back, so I decided to reach out to Scott and find out about the enhancements that went into this new version.
I had a query recently from a partner who was deploying VMware Horizon View 6.1 on top of an all-flash VSAN 6.0. They had done all the due diligence with configuring the AF-VSAN appropriately, marking certain flash devices as capacity devices, and so on. The configuration looked something like this: The they went ahead and deployed Horizon View 6.1, which they had done many times before on hybrid configurations. They were able to successfully deploy full clone pools on the AF-VSAN, but hit a strange issue when deploying linked clone pools (floating/dedicated). The clone virtual machine operation would fail with…
With the release of VSAN 6.0, and the new all-flash configuration (AF-VSAN), I have received a number of queries around our 10% cache recommendation. The main query is, since AF-VSAN no longer requires a read cache, can we get away with a smaller write cache/buffer size? Before getting into the cache sizing, it is probably worth beginning this post with an explanation about the caching algorithm changes between version 5.5 and 6.0. In VSAN 5.5, which came as a hybrid configuration only with a mixture of flash and spinning disk, cache behaved as both a write buffer (30%) and read…