Oracle Hardware20
Can all storage architectures handle VM workloads equally well?
Oracle Hardware
Not all architectures are created equal: ZS3 is superior for virtualization - SSG-Now Report: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/nas/snapshop-report-analyst-paper-2008431.pdf
Dave Vellante
no!
cmosoares
ZS3 can support as many as 10,000 VMs per system; EMC announced support for 6,600 for VNX 8000
Dave Vellante
a write to flash first architecture should deal with the IO blender problem better
Oracle Hardware
ZS3 designed for highly virtualized data centers – Taneja Group: Top Performance on Mixed workloads, Unbeatable for Oracle Databases http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/nas/taneja-group-zs3-analyst-paper-2008432.pdf
cmosoares
A couple of Wikibon reports point to hybrid, flash-first architectures http://bit.ly/1icydbB http://bit.ly/NYPhn6
Kerstin Woods
Definitely not. Most storage vendors (other than Oracle) don't have enough cache/CPU or an SMP OS to be able to handle random, heavy VM I/O to begin with...not to mention VM-level analytics to be able to resolve VM impacts.
Dave Vellante
I would think dtrace would be an effective tool in finding hot spots in, for example, a vmware situation - the io blender problem makes performance mgt a 'science project' for many customers
Dave Vellante
There are many factors that effect performance, architecture, integration levels but also (very importantly) the application itself and how well it's designed
cmosoares
DTrace part of Oracle ZS3 data services provide highly granular VM-level view of the data stream, so admins can quickly spot the VM(s) that's causing the performance bottleneck. See here http://bit.ly/1m84Rcn
Bob Handlin
@dvellante Large, consolidated virtual environments show off dtrace better than any other workload. Based on the conversations we're having, people aren't thrilled with the analytics on competing storage systems, which are cobbled together.