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.
PROBLEM DESCRIPTION
Dentists at the St. James Hospital used an x-ray imaging application that was slow to respond to searches for patients x-ray images especially when a large number of doctors were concurrently trying to retrieve such images.
STEPS TO IDENTIFY ROOT CAUSE
We ran VMware’s esxtop utility for a day to poll for read and write latency and throughput data from these VMs. By doing so, we were able to identify the root cause as high read latencies. Specifically, of the 36 samples that were taken during a 9-hour work day, it was found that 28 of those samples showed greater than 20 millisecond latencies from within the VMs.
VIRTUCACHE AS A SOLUTION
VirtuCache was installed on VMware hosts that contained these application VMs. VirtuCache was configured to automatically cache data from disk based storage for these hosts to a 80 GB Fusion IO PCIe Flash card. Within 15 minutes of deployment, performance of this application was substantially improved. Esxtop was run once more to collect read and write latency and throughput data from the VMs. It was now found that only 2 of the 36 samples collected, showed latencies over 20 ms.
CONCLUSIONS
Without VirtuCache, 78% of the time, latency within VMs was over 20 ms. With VirtuCache deployed along with a 80 GB FIO card, only 5% of the time, latency from within VMs was over 20ms.
