Archive for June, 2009:
How to Add VMware Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) adapters.
A few months before the vSphere release VMware showed some amazing stats in regards to the increased level of I/O that can be attained in a virtual infrastructure. They posted this info on their blog and the outcome of the testing was impressive. They were able to achieve 350,000 I/O operations per second on a single vSphere host (ESX 4.0) and with just 3 virtual machines. Their testing utilized the EMC Enterprise Flash Drives, which have an incredibly high throughput. They talked about how the VMware Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) adapter was able to achieve 12% more throughput with 18% less CPU cost compared to the LSI virtual adapter.
Those stats are equally impressive, since being able to achieve an almost 20% CPU decrease while increasing performance means more density per virtual host. This further allows companies to squeeze more resources from their virtual infrastructure without needing to purchase more hardware. And in this economy, everyone is trying to get their money’s worth when it comes to their infrastructure capital spending.