Archive for May, 2008
Wednesday, May 21st, 2008
We're really excited to announce that we hit over 100k IOPS!
This was done using 77TB of storage, adding a 3rd rack totalling 495 disks -- enough storage to hold the entire printed library of congress, and all being driven from a single ESX server!
Chethan's just written a detailed report over ...
Posted in Performance, VMware, Virtualization | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008
We've doubled the number of disks, totaling just over 300, taking up two entire CX-380 racks..
That's 44TB of disk, and enough spindles to drive over 100,000 exchange users...
More disks are on the way...
Posted in Benchmarking, VMware, Virtualization | No Comments »
Monday, May 19th, 2008
We're at Santa Cruz this week at the workshop for file system benchmarking. , chaired by Erez Zadok of StonyBrook University.
The objective of this week is to converge on a set of strategies and recommendations towards more accurate and representative benchmarking of file systems and storage.
Many of the File Systems ...
Posted in Benchmarking, FileBench, Performance, VMware, Virtualization, Work | No Comments »
Monday, May 19th, 2008
We now starting to see some of the more enterprise-league I/O rates... In contrast to the simple NVRAM cached 3 disk configurations used in the previous posts, we've moved to one of the more typical SAN based setups used for running the bigger applications. In this case, we now have ...
Posted in Benchmarking, Fun, NAS, Performance, VMware, Virtualization | 1 Comment »
Friday, May 16th, 2008
This result is on a somewhat tiny system -- we are able to get 4013 iops from a Dell 1950 server with just 3 disks.
You might expect a somewhat smaller number with just 3 disks (like ~750), but these servers have a non-volatile cached storage RAID controller, which is able ...
Posted in Benchmarking, VMware, Virtualization | No Comments »
Thursday, May 15th, 2008
Our engineers have been working on the I/O challenge...
They are using iometer as the workload generator -- it can faithfully produce a random I/O load on Windows, and small-random-io is typical of a database access. I'd love to use filebench, but we don't have a Windows port yet ...
Posted in Benchmarking, VMware, Virtualization | 4 Comments »
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
We all know that the performance of I/O critical to many enterprise style applications. Typically, it's the throughput and latency of the I/O system that is critical to performance, especially to that of online web or transaction processing systems. Since these style of applications operate on small data items at ...
Posted in Benchmarking, VMware, Virtualization | No Comments »
Monday, May 12th, 2008
I just saw that Neel at Sun has released a sister project to FileBench -- uPerf. uPerf uses a similar model-based approach to allow flexible, application realistic workload to be synthesized. The source for uPerf is available too...
We look forward to researching how uPerf can be used to synthesize virtual ...
Posted in Benchmarking | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
I'm starting a new tutorial this year at Usenix -- all about performance and tuning of VMware ESX server. The session is on Tuesday, June 24, 2008 in Boston, and is an all-day class.
Who should attend: Anyone who is involved in planning or deploying virtualization on VMware ESX and wants ...
Posted in VMware, Virtualization | 6 Comments »
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
A recent comment about 'bench-marketing' caught my attention. I much prefer to see performance analysis of real-world benchmarks, because well-designed studies server as reference examples to guide solid decisions when planning for virtualization. The specific comments were about wanting to see more examples of scale-out performance - a term I ...
Posted in Benchmarking, Oracle, Performance, VMware, Virtualization | No Comments »