New mclock I/O Scheduler in vSphere 5.5 – Some details

My colleague Duncan wrote a post relatively recently around the new mclock I/O scheduler which VMware introduced in vSphere 5.5. He also mentioned some caveats with the new scheduler, especially around the I/O size (32K) used with the IOPS setting, which may lead to some unexpected behaviour. As Duncan mentioned, the reason for introducing the new scheduler is primarily to provide a better I/O scheduling mechanism that allows for limits, shares and reservations. Unfortunately, we didn’t do a very good job of announcing this change in I/O scheduling, or documenting the behaviour, and it has led to a number of…