5 Responses

  1. Newsletter: March 28, 2015 | Notes from MWhite

    […] vSphere: A great place to run Enterprise Databases Michael does a very nice job explaining how this is very true.  He is a doing it on a Nutanix but do not let that distract you, […]

  2. forbsy
    forbsy at |

    Wow. This conversation on kernel mode vs VSA must have really hit a nerve at Nutanix :). Josh Odgers, Andre L and yourself have all written articles in the last few days that talk about it. Judging from the information and diagrams used, I think it’s fair to say it’s in relation to Frank Dennemen’s article ‘Basic elements of the flash virtualization platform – Part 1’ – http://frankdenneman.nl/2013/06/18/basic-elements

    I suppose the question I ask myself is if guys like Duncan, and Frank (who have probably forgotten more about how the vSphere kernel operates than most know) believe that kernel integration introduces less performance penalty with respect to IOPS (but probably more importantly less latency), I suppose I tend to believe that.

    Satyam Vaghani (Godfather of VMFS and various VMware storage innovations) probably has a good idea about kernel mode vs VSA for servicing IO. It’s doesn’t go unnoticed that he choose kernel mode integration for his FVP product, rather than depending on VSA’s.

    I think your test works well in a small controlled environment that you setup. I would like to see the results of hundreads of dissimilar workloads. With the Nutanix concept of locality (which is great) the local CVM would be servicing a greater # of transactions. It’s difficult to believe that scheduling wouldn’t start to pose some issues. Enough that latency (perhaps going from microseconds to milliseconds, which when dealing with flash resources can be material) might be an issue.

    Lastly, how much resources does each CVM take up? Wouldn’t it be nicer to distribute those valuable CPU and RAM resources to the workloads in the cluster that could use them? By introducing VSA’s I’m having to size my clusters to account for those resources, instead of leaving those resources to my various applications. Would it be fair to ask, if Nutanix had the opportunity during development to use kernel integration vs CVM’s, would they have remained with CVM’s being the best option?

    Reply
  3. 5 Step Process for Getting the Best Out of Your VMware Support Experience | Long White Virtual Clouds

    […] and this is one of the reasons VMware vSphere is a great place to run Business Critical Apps and Enterprise Databases. A lot of this article should just be common sense, but a lot of times it is uncommon. I’d be […]

  4. Performance Testing Databases with Dell DVD Store 2.1 Benchmark | Long White Virtual Clouds

    […] Dell DVDStore is a freely available Database Benchmark that you can use to test a variety of different databases, such as SQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, on either Windows or Linux. It has been around since 2007 and was originally developed by Dave Jaffe at Dell and Todd Muirhead at VMware. It is also included as one of the workloads in the VMmark 2 VMware virtualization benchmark. The current version is 2.1, released in 2011, and it has proved to be a solid and reliable tool. I’ve heard through reliable sources that an updated version may be in the works, so it would be worth looking out for it. This article will briefly cover some of the tips and tricks that I’ve found during testing that I’ve been conducting with DVDStore, such as in my recent article titled VMware vSphere: A Great Place to Run Enterprise Databases. […]

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