Store I/O Challenges
Storage I/O capacity is critical for proper VM performance. VKernel offers solutions to help system administrators properly identify and resolve I/O capacity problems in shared storage environments.
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Performance Bottlenecks in Storage
The underlying storage infrastructure used to support a virtualized environment has its own set of capacity and performance bottlenecks. These bottlenecks can be located:
- at the host HBA
- in the fabric or network
- at the storage array controller
- the storage array back end
- or the disks themselves
These choke points can cause storage I/O challenges represented broadly by throughput, latency or IOPS issues. Mitigating these challenges involves either moving VMs between hosts, or moving data stores between storage arrays. More in depth mitigation can occur by reconfiguring the networks or the underlying storage infrastructure supporting a datastore. The challenge is to quickly and easily identify current bottlenecks while also predicting future performance problems and determining if the VM system administrator can resolve the problems or whether more intensive action by the storage team is needed.
Solving Storage I/O Challenges
Similar to the challenges presented by general performance bottlenecks, detecting and correctly diagnosing storage I/O problems requires more than just real time monitoring tools. VKernel's Capacity Analytics Engine collects and analyzes over 20 metrics for each VM across resource pools, hosts and clusters on a standardized time interval. For a typical 100 VM environment, that is over 2000 metrics.
VKernel's Capacity Analyzer uses the information from the Capacity Analytics Engine to show current and future bottlenecks for:
- Latency
- Queue latency
- Throughput
- Swap
If a full analysis of the VM environment is not initially needed, VKernel provides a simple storage assessment tool, VKernel StorageVIEW. StorageVIEW is free to use, simple to download, <10MB desktop tool provides near instant visibility into the top five host/datastore pairs and their associated VMs with the highest latency.
Summary
Storage I/O challenges can be solved with proper capacity management. VKernel's capacity management solutions enable VM administrators to detect and prevent storage problems.
