How many I/O “PORTS” were used to generate this level of I/O activity?

Then one can calculate IO per PORT !

Hyper-V, based on QLogic experiments with Solid State storage indicated about 170,000-180,000 IOPS from Hyper-V using a single 8Gb Fibre Channel HBA port.

Ergo, about 2 HBA ports would deliver 340,000 IOPS.

How many such 8Gb FC ports would VMware need ?

The goal is simple – by showing upper limits – we can change the question from “what can I virtualize” to “what CAN’T I virtualize”, and then move to “ok, what’s a reasonable way to move forward and be as successful, low risk, as low cost, and efficient as possible”. BTW – guys, EFDs are very real. We’ve sold out for 4 consecutive quarters now – we can’t literally meet the demand fast enough. Every customer has workloads that are gated by performance, not just capacity.

We ALSO produce a TON of content that are real-world configurations, real world workloads (often with side-by-side with physical, and the same platform, so you can do a direct comparison).

For example, in the last 24 hrs:

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/05/integrated-vsphere-enterprise-workloads-all-together-at-scale.html

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/05/more-on-exchange-on-vsphere-including-ft.html

@Scott:

You’re 100% right. The other “app on VMware” crime is the same one that happens in the physical world – talking in GB in configurations, when it’s about GB/MBps/IOPs/ms. Often – the VMware administrator only “sees” GB (I mean “capacity”), and therefore has no idea about the other factors.

I believe the point of the effort from VMware and EMC was to show that VMware CAN handle incredible amounts of I/O without falling down. There are a very few organizations that will generate that amount of I/O with 1 host and 3 guests.

I believe TimC is correct in that EFDs are atypical, however, media is not relevant to the objective of this specific test.

Scott, you make a good point regarding storage and volume types. I think what is often a “lost art” in virtualizaiton efforts (and non-virtualization SAN deployments) is the carving and provisioning of the storage.

Just because you have a NetApp, EMC, Lefthand or IBM SAN doesn’t automatically make your storage optimal. Storage tuning is something that takes time and effort and planning that most clients and a good number of “engineers/consultants” just don’t do.

Very well said!

There are case studies where application performance on virtual platform is within 85 to 90% of native. In some cases, aggregate performance from virtual machines on a single host beats the aggregate performance on the same hardware on native.

Checkout the following links for more details:
http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2009/04/d.html
http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2009/02/vmware-sets-performance-record-with-specweb2005-result.html
http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2008/02/16000-exchange.html

Some of these applications do require high I/O bandwidth (link# 1). vSphere can comfortably handle that and do much more as shown above.

I do agree with you that using EFDs to back a VMware installation is nothing like your typical setup. If someone were to create a “workload X on raw hardware vs. workload X in VMware”, we’d have to be careful to make sure that it is an apples-to-apples comparison. Like I said in my recent Virtualization Congress presentation, if you wouldn’t run that database on a 5-disk RAID-5 set when it’s physical, you shouldn’t run that database on a VMFS datastore sitting on a 5-disk RAID-5 set after it’s been virtualized. Just because it’s virtualized doesn’t mean the underlying disk I/O requirements magically change.

Personally, I believe that is the key reason why people think “it can’t push I/O.”

Show me workload X on raw hardware vs. workload X in VMware, using a typical setup consisting of FC drives (no EMC, I’m sorry, as much as you proclaim otherwise, flash drives to back a VMware farm is nothing remotely resembling a typical setup). The reason people say “it can’t push I/O” is because of the overhead vs. raw hardware, not because they literally think VMware can’t generate I/O.