Today my good friend Duncan Epping surprised me by shooting me an IM notifying me that he was posting on the impact of partition misalignment and asked if I’d care to comment. Fortunately for me I had time to do just that and this post is an expanded version of what I shared in the comments section at YellowBricks. I’d suggest that anyone interested begin at YellowBricks before … [Read more...] about Raising Awareness Around the Misalignment of Data
Performance
Transparent Storage Cache Sharing– Part 2: More Use Cases
In part one of this series I introduced you to Transparent Storage Cache Sharing and introduced the use case of serving virtual machines and their binaries. The post received some great feedback and allowed me to realize that I wasn’t as clear as I had hoped to be in beginning this conversation. Before we continue the conversation by looking at additional use cases, I think I … [Read more...] about Transparent Storage Cache Sharing– Part 2: More Use Cases
Transparent Storage Cache Sharing– Part 1: An Introduction
I expect most of my readers are familiar with Transparent Page Sharing (TPS). For those in need of a refresh, TPS increases the over all performance capabilities of an ESX/ESXi cluster by ensuring efficient use of server memory. The TPS process achieves this efficiency by eliminating redundant virtual machine memory pages by remapping any duplicate reference back to a single … [Read more...] about Transparent Storage Cache Sharing– Part 1: An Introduction
EMC Benchmarking Shenanigans
I want to tell you a story about how my evening went the other night. I hope you don't mind a narrative. Monday I received an email from a friend in the VMware community, "Did you see the Register, it's unreal, EMC arrays crushed the SPEC benchmarks!" As you'd assume, this news got my attention. I mean, EMC hasn't published a SPEC benchmark in years. (The last EMC SPEC … [Read more...] about EMC Benchmarking Shenanigans
New VMware and NetApp Protocol Performance Report
Many of you have been asking when NetApp & VMware update TR-3697 (multiprotocol performance comparison paper covering VI3) to include vSphere. It is my pleasure to share that as of this morning we have jointly released a new report TR-3808. The paper compares the performance of FC, iSCSI, and NFS connected storage along with the gains made in protocol optimization with … [Read more...] about New VMware and NetApp Protocol Performance Report