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 Samsung PM1725b (in PCIe form factor) and the Intel P4610 (2.5″ U.2 form factor) NVME…
VirtuCache
If your SQL Server runs in a VMware VM and it has performance issues, the root cause of which is slow storage, then our host side caching software for VMware, called VirtuCache, will be able to fix this problem. This post explains how VirtuCache does this by explaining the read…
Even when Ontap Select is using high-performance enterprise SSDs, it shows high latencies because there are quite a few file system layers that the storage IO must traverse. Within Ontap Select, you first create a separate VMFS Datastore on each locally attached SSD or HDD on each host in the…
For the lowest latency VDI VMs, the VMs should be running from in-host RAM. The combination of two facts – that RAM is the lowest latency media there is, and it is on the same motherboard as the host CPU, makes this storage architecture for VDI higher performing than any other….
Considering that a wide range of high speed media – SATA / SAS / NVME SSDs, and RAM can be used for server side caching in VMware, my preferred in-host media is an enterprise grade NVME SSD. Below are the specific SSDs I recommend (as of July 2020): If you…
The quickest to find out if you have storage performance issues in ESXi is by doing SSH (use putty) to the ESXi host and typing the command ‘esxtop’ and then typing the letter ‘v’.
If you are experiencing high write latencies in VMs when using an EMC Unity Hybrid array, it could be because the caching and tiering solutions in Unity don’t cache random small block writes, and your applications might be generating large volumes of such storage IO.
The main advantage that hyper-converged infrastructure(HCI) has over traditional SAN based infrastructure is that HCI has put high speed storage back in the compute nodes. This is also true for Host Side Caching software, with the added benefit that host side caching maintains the flexibility that SAN based infrastructure always had…
Storage IO path in VSAN and VirtuCache is similar to a large extent since both service storage IO from in-VMware host media. Though with VirtuCache, storage latency is lower than with VSAN for four reasons: Reads are almost always serviced from local cache media in VirtuCache. In VSAN there is…