vStorage Thin Provisioning, a key
component of VMware vSphere™, is a technology that redefines storage
provisioning by allocating space on demand to the virtual disks. We recently
published a paper that gives the details of this feature and discusses
experiments conducted to study the performance of thin-provisioned disks in a
VMware vSphere™ environment.
The data we have collected reveals
- Both
thin and thick disks perform similarly on various workloads. - Thin
provisioned disks show similar performance trends as thick disks do when
scaled across different hosts.
fragmentation has negligible impact on the performance of thin provisioned
disks.- There is insignificant performance impact on existing
thick disks if thin provisioning is implemented on a shared array.
The
above graph shows that the performance of a thin provisioned disk matches the
performance of a thick disk. For more details on the environment of these tests
and the experiments conducted we invite you to read the full whitepaper at http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsp_4_thinprov_perf.pdf.