I had a question today from someone who asked if there was any point in enabling SIOC (Storage IO Control) when you have NIOC (Network IO Control) enabled and configured. Lets start with the answer: Yes there is! NIOC controls traffic on a single NIC port level. In other words, when you have 10GbE NIC ports and vMotion, VMs and [...]

This week I received an email from one of my readers about some weird Storage IO Control behavior in their environment.  On a regular basis he would receive an error stating that an “external I/O workload has been detected on shared datastore running Storage I/O Control (SIOC) for congestion management”. He did a quick scan of his complete environment and [...]

I received a very good question this week to which I did not have the answer, I had a feeling but that is not enough. The question was if Storage vMotion would be “throttled” by Storage IO Control. As I happened to have a couple of meetings scheduled this week with the actual engineers I asked the question and this [...]

After attending Irfan Ahmad’s session on Storage IO Control at VMworld I had the pleasure to sit down with Irfan and discuss SIOC. Irfan was so kind to review my SIOC articles(1, 2) and we discussed a couple of other things as well. The discussion and the Storage IO Control session contained some real gems and before my brain resets [...]

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 [...]

I was preparing a post on Storage I/O Control (SIOC) when I noticed this article by Alex Bakman. Alex managed to capture the essence of SIOC in just two sentences. Without setting the shares you can simply enable Storage I/O controls on each datastore. This will prevent any one VM from monopolizing the datatore by leveling out all requests for I/O that [...]

Not sure why hardly anyone picked up on this cool youtube movie about Storage IO Control(SIOC), but I figured it was worth posting. SIOC is probably one of the coolest version coming to a vSphere version in the near future. Scott Drummonds wrote a cool article about it which shows the strength of SIOC when it comes to fairness. One [...]