After my initial post about Storage IO Control I received a whole bunch of questions. Instead of replying via the commenting system I decided to add them to a blog post as it would be useful for everyone to read this. Now I figured this stuff out be reading the PARDA whitepaper 6 times and by going through the log files and CLI of my ESXi host, this is not cast in stone. If anyone has any additional question don’t hesitate to ask them and I’ll be happy to add them and try to answer them!

Here are the questions with the answers underneath in italic:

  1. Q: Why is SIOC not enabled by default?
    A: As datastores can be shared between clusters, clusters could be differently licensed and as such SIOC is not enabled by default.
  2. Q: If vCenter is only needed when enabling the feature, who will keep track of latencies when a datastore is shared between multiple hosts?
    A: Latency values are actually stored on the Datastore itself. From the PARDA academic paper, I figured two methods could be used for this either through network communication or as stated by using the Datastore. Notice the file “iormstat.sf” in green in the screenshot below, I guess that answers the question… the datastore itself is used to communicate the latency of a datastore. I also confirmed with Irfan that my assessment was true.
  3. Q: Where does datastore-wide disk scheduler run from?
    A: The datastore-wide disk scheduler is essentially SIOC or also known as the “PARDA Control Algorithm” and runs on each host sharing that datastore. PARDA consists of two key components which are “latency estimation” and “window size computation”. Latency estimation is used to detect if SIOC needs to throttle queues to ensure each VM gets its fair share. Window size computation is used to calculate what this queue depth should be for your host.
  4. Q: Is PARDA also responsible for throttling the VM?
    A: No, PARDA itself or better said the two major processes that form PARDA (latency estimation and window size computation) don’t control “host local” fairness, the Local scheduler (SFQ) is responsible for that.
  5. Q: Can we in any way control the I/O contention in vCD VM environment (say one VM running high I/O impacting another VM running on same host/datastore)
    A: I would highly recommend to enable this in vCloud Environments to prevent storage based DoS attacks (or just noisy neighbors) and to ensure IO fairness can be preserved. This is one of the reasons VMware developed this mechanism.
  6. Q: I can’t enable SIOC with an Enterprise licence – “License not available to perform the operation”. Is it Enterprise Plus only?
    A: SIOC requires Enterprise Plus
  7. Q: Can I verify what the Latency is?
    A: Yes you can, go to the Host – Performance Tab and select “Datastore”, “Real Time”, select the datastore and select “Storage I/O Control normalized latency”. Please note that the unit for measurement is microseconds!
  8. Q: This doesn’t appear to work in NFS?
    A: SIOC can only be enabled on VMFS volumes currently.

If you happen to be at VMworld next week, make sure to attend this session: TA8233 Prioritizing Storage Resource Allocation in ESX Based Virtual Environments Using Storage I/O Control!