VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 benchmark
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)