Improves storage performance for vmware vms
VirtuCache significantly reduces storage latencies regardless of how random or high the storage throughput. This helps our customers realize:
- Improved application performance: The applications most benefited by VirtuCache fall into two categories (1) your storage IO intensive applications that run in VMs, like databases, ERP, EMR, dev/ops, business intelligence, search engines, etc, and those that run in the ESXi kernel like backups, anti-virus, VM provisioning, and snapshots, and (2) Applications that are latency sensitive like VDI and VM boot. If VDI VMs suffer from momentary freezing of cursor/mouse, jittery audio/video, long boot times – all symptoms of high storage latencies, then VirtuCache can fix these problems.
- Higher VM density: Storage IO bottleneck is often the main reason for a smaller number of VMs deployed on ESXi hosts. By eliminating this constraint, you can increase the number of VMs deployed per host.
Postpone storage network and appliance upgrades
If you are looking to upgrade your storage appliance or network to improve storage performance, it will be a lot cheaper to use VirtuCache with in-host NVME Flash. And if you do decide to upgrade your SAN, you wouldn’t need to buy expensive higher-end SSD arrays. Even for the most IO intensive or latency sensitive workloads, mid-range arrays like Dell ME4, HP MSA, Seagate Exos will suffice since, with VirtuCache in the IO path, the backend storage appliance is completely removed from the performance aspects of storage. All performance aspects of storage are serviced by VirtuCache.
cheaper than SAN upgrade
To deploy VirtuCache, all you need is an enterprise SSD (or host RAM). An enterprise-grade NVME SSD costs 30 US Cents/GB and does 900,000 IOPS random reads & 200,000 IOPS random writes. Add to it VirtuCache license fees of $3000 per host. On the other hand, for a SAN upgrade, even if you didn’t go with the most expensive option of replacing the array and network, at the very least, you’d need to add SSDs to your storage appliance. SSDs from storage vendors cost more than if the same SSDs were bought retail (to be installed in the VMware host for use with VirtuCache), so just augmenting your existing array with SSDs might be more expensive than using VirtuCache.
Also with us, you can start small by deploying VirtuCache on only one host as a first step. If you like the experience, you can buy more licenses and additional SSDs for your other hosts over time.
Reduced network traffic
With VirtuCache, since almost all the read requests are now being served from in-host cache, there is almost no read traffic that goes over the SAN. For writes, since VirtuCache coalesces writes before committing those to the backend array, write IOPS hitting the backend array are much reduced as well.