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.
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) |
Software Defined everything. Still a very hot item in the ever strong developing IT landscape.
In the year 2012 ‘Software Defined’ looked like just another buzzword, but the market is changing direction more and more towards software defined solutions. The Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) is nowadays supported by Software Defined Storage (SDS), Software Defined Network (SDN) and security solutions. All very cool stuff!! I want to take a closer look at SDS in this blog post.
So…What is Software Defined Storage? Everybody has an idea on what it should be. My idea of SDS matches the quote below:
Software-defined storage (SDS) is the process of using software-based techniques to create, deploy and manage storage resources and infrastructure. It enables abstracting or separating storage services from hardware devices by using software or programmatic access to extract and manipulate storage resources
UPDATE: VMware announced the public beta for their new vSphere version!! Sign-up here: https://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vsphere-beta
With the release of the latest vSphere 5.5 version (update 1) in March 2014, VMware once again took a major step in the development of it’s hypervisor and the supplementary software and tools. Finally the vCenter appliance took over from the Windows installed version as the primary choice for vCenter deployment. The Windows installed version now officially supports Windows Server 2012 R2.
In the first 5.5 release various improvements were made; SSO is enhanced, support for 62TB VMDK, 16Gb FC support to name a few. And of course VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) is now included in the update 1 version!!
There are some features however still missing. I, for one, would very much like to see these missing features in the next major release of vSphere. Having said that, I don’t expect VMware to announce the release of vSphere 6 this year. I think the coming period will be used by VMware to further engage customers to adopt VSAN and NSX. It will be very interesting to see on what scale these technologies will thrive! !
When thinking of what I would like to see in the vSphere 6 line-up, I came up with the stuff listed below:
Let’s walk through my wish list…