I’ve seen this myth floating around from time to time and as I never publicly wrote about it I figured it was time to write an article to debunk this myth. The question that is often posed is if thin disks will hurt performance due to fragmentation of the blocks allocated on the VMFS volume. I guess we need to [...]

Well depending on what type of queues we are talking about of course, but in general no one likes queues. We are however confronted with queues on a daily basis, especially in compute environments. I was having a discussing with an engineer around storage queues and he sent me the following which I thought was worth sharing as it gives [...]

I was just answering some questions on the VMTN forum when someone asked the following question: Should I upgrade our VMFS luns from 3.21 (some in 3.31) to 3.46 ? What benefits will we get? This person was referred to an article by Frank Brix Pedersen who states the following: Ever since ESX3.0 we have used the VMFS3 filesystem and [...]

Last week I wrote about the different datamovers being used when a Storage vMotion is initiated and the destination VMFS volume has a different blocksize as the source VMFS volume. Not only will it make a difference in terms of reclaiming zero space, but as mentioned it also makes a different in performance. The question that always arises is how [...]

I was reading Richard Garsthagen’s article about anti-virus solutions yesterday and decided that this deserved a little bit of extra attention as it is an often overlooked area when it comes to architecture and impact. As Richard points out the difference in terms of load that it generates and overhead is enormous. All of these combined will most definitely result [...]

This is just a post to make it easier finding these excellent articles/threads on VMTN about measuring storage performance: Scott Drummonds – Storage System Performance Analysis with Iometer VMTN Unofficial Storage Perf Thread I – http://communities.vmware.com/thread/73745 VMTN Unofficial Storage Perf Thread II – http://communities.vmware.com/thread/19784 All these have one “requirement”  and that is that Iometer is used. Another one that I [...]

I was reading an article by one of my Tech Marketing colleagues, Kyle Gleed and coincidentally Gabe published an article about the same topic to which Frank replied and just now Forbes Guthrie… the topic being Large Pages. I have written about this topic many times in the past and both Kyle, Gabe, Forbes and Frank mentioned the possible impact [...]