There are some applications, typically desktop and SMB CAD/CAM, Manufacturing, ERP software that require large amounts of IOs per second (greater than 10,000) at small queue depth (less than 8). For a primer on how Queue Depths affect Latency and IOPS, review this post , which defines various types of…
Storage Performance Benchmarking
VM snapshot is a very commonly used feature in the VMware vSphere environment. A VM snapshot preserves the state and data of a VM at a particular point in time. This includes the VM powered state, along with all the data including disks, memory and virtual devices. This makes the…
Here is a quick way to reproduce your entire ESXi cluster-wide production workload using only one VM running a storage IO testing tool like FIO or Iometer. This exercise is useful when you evaluate new storage technologies to see how they might perform with your real-life workload, but without actually deploying…
Iometer is a great storage IO testing tool. It is easy to use, flexible, accurate, and free. Below are steps to run Iometer from within a Windows VM running on VMware. Step1: Install the older 2006.07.27 edition. Don’t use the latest 1.1.0 edition which has bugs. Download link is here. Change…
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…
Performance Benchmark using SQLIO that compares Storage I/O with and without VirtuCache
Performance benchmark using Iometer comparing Storage I/O with and without VirtuCache, with multi-threaded 67% read 33% write workload that saturated the disk.