A first for me:
Session Title: Simulating Storage IO workloads within virtual environments
Session Type: Breakout Session
Session Abstract:
With Tier 1 applications becoming commonplace within virtual environments, the need to simulate the IO profiles of those workloads prior to deployment has become a concern for the teams that manage virtual infrastructures. As we have seen with each subsequent release of vSphere, more emphasis has been placed on increasing the efficiencies of storage operations, and offloading those operations from the ESXi hosts and onto the storage arrays themselves. CPU and Memory resource performance has continued to increase as their costs have decreased, yet the one area where we cannot easily or quickly make significant cost effective changes is the shared storage platform. Where these memory and CPU resources were once look upon as the chief culprits in resource contention, storage IO performance is taking over as the prime area of concern for many IT shops.
This breakout session will be a discussion about the IO profiles of a number of varying production workloads, and how we can use tools such as the VMware IO Analyzer to set a baseline for IO profiles and how they will perform on current or proposed storage platforms within our virtual infrastructure.
Submitting to Present at VMworld: US
Session Outline:
Session Outline: A. Overview of the history of storage related changes within the ESX/ESXi hypervisor platform throughout the years. B. A look at some of the common IO profiles for Tier 1 application workloads that are targets for virtualization from the SMB to Enterprise space ( Oracle DB, Exchange, Lotus Notes, SAP, SQL, Video Delivery, OLTP, etc) C. Discussion about the various tools available to simulate IO workloads within virtual environments with an emphasis on the VMware IO Analyzer tool and how it can provide benchmarks for storage and IO performance. D. A roundup of results from performance testing done on various storage arrays. E. Looking towards the future with improvements in vSphere 5.1 and beyond.
Key Takeaway 1: Identifying how a given IO profile or workload will perform on existing virtual infrastructure is paramount to determining if you should virtualize that workload.
Key Takeaway 2 :Storage performance is the key to higher consolidation ratios within virtual environments, and the ability to simulate various IO workloads within your virtual environment will provide IT teams with the means to make a best possible choice on storage system purchases
Key Takeaway 3: End users can utilize free tools such as the VMware IO Analyzer to perform IO workload analysis and benchmarking for their existing environments.
Technical Level: Technical
Tracks: Infrastructure
Topics: Storage
Gabe,
Great submission! I think this session would go a long way of demystifying the backend storage for vSphere administrators. For some they really don’t have the visibility into there storage environments as a sperate team may manage that. This could help them better understand IO metrics for different applications as well as show them how to baseline/performance test an application prior to releasing it into production.
-Jason