VMware View Storage Accelerator (VSA), a.k.a. Content Based Read Cache (CBRC), versus Virtunet VirtuCache
VSA caches only those blocks that are shared by all VDI VMs, and it can only use a maximum of 2GB host RAM. Because of these two reasons, it ends up caching only a small subset of blocks from the master VM 1. In comparison, VirtuCache caches all storage IO, both reads and writes, whether it is from master VM, end user VDI VMs, server VMs, ESXi kernel, and it can cache to large amounts of in-host SSD and/or RAM. These two aspects of VirtuCache ensure that almost all storage IO is serviced from...
To Improve CEPH performance for VMware, Install SSDs in VMware hosts, NOT OSD hosts.
SSDs deployed for caching in CEPH OSD servers are not very effective. The problem lies not in the SSDs, but because they are deployed at a point in the IO path that is downstream (in relation to VMs that run end user applications) of where the IO bottleneck is. This post looks at the performance shortcoming of CEPH and its solution.
There are two options for improving the performance of CEPH.
Option 1 is to deploy SSDs in CEPH OSD servers for journaling (write caching) and read...
How to Select SSDs for Host Side Caching for VMware – Interface, Model, Size, Source and Raid Level ?
In terms of price/performance, enterprise NVME SSDs have now become the best choice for in-VMware host caching media. They are higher performing and cost just a little more than their lower performing SATA counterparts. The Intel P4600/P4610 NVME SSDs are my favorites. The Samsung PM1725a is my second choice. If you don’t have a spare 2.5” NVME or PCIe slot in your ESXi host, which precludes you from using NVME SSDs, you could use enterprise SATA SSDs. If you choose to go with SATA SSDs,...
Reducing Build Times for DevOps
Problem definition: ServiceNow's Itapp Dev/Ops team wanted to improve storage performance from their existing storage appliance and storage network without requiring a hardware refresh.
Solution: Virtunet’s VirtuCache software improves the performance of any SAN based storage appliance and storage network, no matter how old or slow. With VirtuCache, the performance improvement that customers get from their existing storage infrastructure rivals the performance of all-SSD arrays.
VirtuCache...
PetaByte Scale Enterprise Grade Server SAN Storage for The Creation Museum
Creation Museum in Kentucky, USA is a museum about Bible history and creationism.
Their storage needs were typical of a museum, requiring large amounts of storage for digital multimedia content related to the various exhibits at the museum.
They were looking for the below list of features from their new storage:
The ability to sustain a loss of any one component – server, HDD, SSD, NIC card, software instance etc;
The ability for this storage to interface with VMware over iSCSI;...
Virtunet’s Write-Back (Read+Write) Caching Competing with Write-Through (Read-Only) Caching at a Large School District
Host side caching software needs to accelerate both reads and writes especially in light of increasing competition from all-flash arrays. Caching writes is important even for workloads that are read intensive. If we were not to accelerate writes, the reads behind the writes on the same thread will not be accelerated, thus slowing reads as well.
Using TPC-C benchmark, we showed 2x improvement in performance versus a read caching software vendor at a large...
VirtuCache Improves Hadoop Performance within VMs at Stanford
Typically Hadoop workloads are run on bare-metal servers. However since Stanford’s School of Medicine was 100% virtualized, and because their security, monitoring & management tools were integrated within VMware, it was easier for them to deploy Hadoop within VMs, instead of provisioning new physical servers.
The biggest challenge Stanford faced with Hadoop VMs was low throughput and high latencies for writes to disk.
Deploying VirtuCache resulted in write latencies in Hadoop reducing...
VirtuCache Improves Performance of Healthcare Imaging Application deployed in VMware VMs
EHR, imaging, analytics, desktop & application virtualization applications are prone to storage performance issues in VMware, that are easily solved with VirtuCache.
VirtuCache Improves the Performance of Equallogic Appliances for VMware VMs and Bare-Metal Linux Servers
By deploying VirtuCache in Dun & Bradstreet's VMware environment, we demonstrated sub 10ms VM latencies for high, write-intensive, random storage IO, which in turn facilitated the P2V of their database servers.