SoftLayer local disk performance SATA/vSAN/SSD

What disk performance you can expect from local drives in Softlayer with VMware vSphere6, vSAN & local SATA or SSD drives?

This article is here to help you see and decide if performance will be enough for your needs.

I have 3 hosts with:

• hardware Supermicro 2 CPU, 12 cores, 256 GB RAM,
• hypervisor OS VMware vSphere 6 build 3073146,
• virtual machine OS Windows Server 2012 R2.

I use CrystalDiskMark installed in Virtual Machine for testing disk performance.

VMware Disks types and testing examples:

• 1 TB SATA in RAID1,
• vSAN 800 GB SSD 2 TB SATA 4x on 3 hosts 20 TB datastore,
• 800 GB SSD standalone.

Environment:

• host configuration was done similar (+RAM 256 GB, +SSD 800 GB) to Aram’s article Part 1 – Ordering ESXi hosts on Softlayer,
• vSAN configuration and tuning was done exactly as Aram’s article Part 4 – Configuring VSAN on Softlayer.

1 TB SATA in RAID1

The disk is used for VMware hypervizor boot, but we can use it to compare the performance with other options.

vSAN 800 GB SSD + 2 TB SATA 4 drives, 20 TB datastore

Main storage location for most virtual machines 20 TB datastore, main VMware storage.

800 GB SSD standalone

In case that vSAN performance is not grating you the required IOPS throughput you can always switch to local SSD in standalone or RAID1 configuration, HA have to be used on application level. Or you can go for vSAN all flash.

Summary

There is much more options in SoftLayer as to what choice of storage you have, but if you decided to go with local drives these are your options. Results are more or less expected, the worst is local SATA,  vSAN and standalone SSD always depend on type of application and how it uses the disk capabilities.

Use case

From troubleshooting point of view it is very good to have standalone SSD in one of your servers. In case an Application owner complains about speed you have options to use storage vMotion to your SSD and you can ask them: “Does it help?”. Usually not, but you did prove that storage is not the problem and will help you in bottleneck identification.

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Roman Macek

VMware & Virtualization SME

Roman grew up with Microsoft server administration in 2006 he switched to VMware. He focuses on designing of solutions for hybrid cloud, business continuity, high availability, disaster recovery, backup and vdi. He has background and mindset in hardware and VMware operating systems administration. He holds certifications from Microsoft, VMware and other industry vendors. VCAP5-DCD, VCAP5-DCA, VCP5, VCP5-DT, MCITP, MCTS, vExpert 2015/16.

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