At VMworld I met up with the guys presenting the Storage I/O Control session, Irfan Ahmad and Chethan Kumar. As many of you hopefully know Irfan has always been active in the social media space (virtualscoop.org). Chethan however is “new” and just started his own blog. Chethan is a Senior Member of the Performance Engineering team  At VMware. He focuses [...]

It seems that a lot of vendors are starting to update their firmware to enable virtualized workloads from the vStorage APIs for Array Integration, also known as VAAI. Not only the vendors are starting to show interest, also the bloggers are picking up on it. Hence the reason I wanted to reiterate some of the excellent details out there and [...]

Today we had an interesting discussion on the VCDX mailing list. One thing I noticed a while back when I was randomly looking around in “esxtop” was a new field. The field is called ” RESVSTATS and can be enabled in all disk related displays(d, u,v). This will make troubleshooting storage related performance issues a bit easier as the SCSI [...]

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 [...]

To be honest and completely frank I really don’t have a clue. I have been reading all these so called best practices around changing the default behaviour of “1000″ to “1″ but none of these contain any justification. Just to give you an example take a look at the following guide: Configuration best practices for HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array [...]