VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 benchmark

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Last week I was going through ‘What’s New: VMware Virtual SAN 6.0‘, it seems like VSAN 6.0 is bigger, better and faster. The latest installment of VMware’s distributed storage platform provides a significant IOPS boost, up to twice the performance in hybrid mode. The new VirstoFS on-disk format is capable of high performance snapshots and clones. Time to put it to the test.

 

Disclaimer: this benchmark has been performed on a home lab setup, components used are not listed in the VSAN HCL. My goal is to confirm an overall IOPS and snapshot performance increase by comparing VSAN 5.5 with 6.0. I did so by running a synthetic IOmeter workload.

VMware has a really nice blogpost on more advanced VSAN performance testing utilizing IOmeter.

 

Hardware

My lab consists of 3 Shuttle SZ87R6 nodes, connected by a Cisco SG300.

 Chipset  Z87
 Processor  Intel Core i5-4590S
 Memory  32 GB
 NIC 1  1 GE (management)
 NIC 2  1 GE (VSAN)
 HDD 1  Samsung 840 Evo (120GB)
 HDD 2  HGST Travelstar 7K1000 (1TB)

 
 

ESXi/VSAN versions

  • ESXi 5.5 Update 2 (build 2068190)
  • ESXi 6.0 (build 2494585)

Stretched Cluster on IBM SVC (Part 3)

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This is part 3 of the VMware Stretched Cluster on IBM SVC blogpost series.

PART 1     (intro, SVC cluster, I/O group, nodes)
PART 2     (split I/O group, deployment, quorum, config node)
PART 3    (HA, PDL, APD)

 

I explained how a SVC Split Cluster reacts to certain failure conditions in part 2. Now that we know how the storage layer behaves, let’s take a closer look at how this all ties in with the VMware layer. This is by no means a complete guide to every setting/configuration option involved, more of an excerpt of the ones I consider to be important. This post is based on vSphere 5.5.

VMware Stretched Cluster isn’t a feature you enable by ticking some boxes, it’s a design built around the workings of HA, DRS and a couple of other mechanisms.

First, I would like to briefly explain the concepts APD (All Paths Downs) and PDL (Permanent Device Loss).

 

APD

In an All Paths Down scenario, the ESXi host loses all paths to the storage device. The host is unable to communicate with the storage array. Examples of failures that can trigger APD are a failing HBA or a failing SAN.

APD All Paths Down

figure 1. APD

Blog growth and VMware vExpert 2015!

Blog growth and VMware vExpert 2015!

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Today we achieved the VMware vExpert 2015 status!! All three of us!! We are very happy with the fact we are being recognized as contributors to the VMware community.

vexpert15-vexpert

It is funny to see ourselves enthusiastic about blogging as we are! We used to make kinda fun of bloggers… don’t know why exactly, probably jealousy speaking back then. 😉
However, as we started Cloudfix in April 2014, we rapidly became more and more involved with each other as members of Cloudfix and the VMware community. Our hangouts chat, containing the three of us, is mega often used! We constantly discuss tech and other stuff with each other. Next to that, we track each others progress in our professional careers in an non-healthy competitive environment. I think we supplement each other. 🙂

So, setting up Cloudfix was a great idea and it’s really fun to do. It is time consuming, but worth it. We saw a growth in numbers of visitors we did not expect in the beginning. Heck, it even got better beginning 2015!! Pretty awesome for a beginning blog like ours…

vSphere 6: vMotion enhancements

vSphere 6: vMotion enhancements

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Don't we all remember when we witnessed our first vMotion and realized which awesome things this made possible in virtualization?!  In vSphere 6 vMotion even got better! vMotion version history…

vSphere 6: mClock scheduler & reservations

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“Storage IO Controls – New support for per Virtual Machine storage reservations to guarantee minimum service levels.” Is listed as one of the new features of vSphere 6.

The new mClock scheduler was introduced with vSphere 5.5 and as you might have guessed, it remains the default IO scheduler in vSphere 6 (don’t mind the typo in the description).

 

mClock advanced setting

 

Besides limits and shares, the scheduler now supports reservations. Let’s do a quick recap on resource management.