Prioritizing Storage Resource Allocation in ESX Based Virtual Environments Using Storage I/O Control

Prioritizing Storage Resource Allocation in ESX Based Virtual Environments Using Storage I/O Control
Datacenters have benefitted immensely from many advantages virtualization has offered such as economies of sharing physical resources, ease of management and live migration.
Virtualization has increased the need for a shared storage infrastructure. Storage systems are accessed by multiple virtual machines hosted on multiple hosts with varying demands and business priorities.
Effective resource management and prioritization among workloads is the key to successful storage level consolidation and prevention of unnecessary over-provisioning of storage resources. To address these issues, we are introducing a new feature in ESX 4.1 called Storage IO control (SIOC). In this talk, we are going to given an overview of this new feature, how to use it, the controls that are exposed to the user and some best practices for using this feature. We will present results of our experimental studies to understand the impact of the feature on application performance. We will illustrate the dynamic capabilities of the feature in managing shared I/O resources across an ESX cluster with performance numbers. Finally, we will present a case study that will underline the need for a fine grained control mechanism for prioritizing I/O resources in a virtual datacenter with shared storage infrastructure and show SIOC can fill that need.
Speaker(s):
Chethan Kumar, Sr. Member of Technical Staff, VMware, Inc.
Ajay Gulati, Member of Technical Staff, VMware, Inc.
Download
http://hotfile.com/dl/92941015/55877c9/TA8233-Prioritizing_Storage_Resource_Allocation_in_ESX_Based_Virtual_Environments_Using_Storage_I-O_Control.mp4.html