As organizations of all sizes evolve to keep pace with a rapidly changing digital landscape, running a wider variety of workloads with varying requirements, the performance of their infrastructure has never been more critical. High performance is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity for businesses running resource-intensive workloads—from OLTP applications to AI. Infrastructure is expected to handle growing volumes of data while maintaining low latency and high throughput.
Hyperconverged storage solutions like VMware vSAN enable the scalability, efficiency, and performance demanded from the modern data center. VMware vSAN Express Storage Architecture (ESA), combined with Samsung’s cutting-edge PM1743 NVMe SSDs, sets a new standard for performance of business-critical workloads on HCI.
In partnership with Samsung, we developed a white paper that demonstrates the potential of vSAN ESA supporting workloads of various I/O profiles. Through a series of rigorous experiments and benchmarks, the paper demonstrates how adjustments to vSAN ESA settings—such as storage policies and number of disks—can significantly enhance performance and responsiveness of applications running on the innovative storage platform.
Activating Next-level Performance
vSAN Express Storage Architecture was designed to support the demands of relational databases and OLTP workloads. Running on NVMe devices, vSAN ESA is poised to deliver faster, more reliable performance while simplifying operations and lifecycle management.
Samsung’s PM1743 NVMe SSDs bring enterprise-grade performance, positioning them among the best devices for VMware vSAN ESA. These drives support the latest PCIe Gen5, providing exceptional speed and reliability for demanding workloads. When deploying storage-intensive solutions, the Samsung SSDs ensure high performance.
Insights for Optimizing Hyperconverged Storage
In a series of rigorous tests conducted with VMware vSAN ESA and Samsung PM1743 NVMe SSDs, the results were impressive across multiple configurations and workloads. Highlighted findings from the study include:
- Peak Performance: With 3 hosts and 100 GB/s networking in a cluster, vSAN ESA achieved maximum performance of 1.49 MIOPS and 25.45 GB/s of throughput.
- Optimal Block Sizes: For achieving the highest performance, block sizes of 64 KB and 128 KB were optimal.
- RAID 5 Efficiency: The RAID 5 storage policy provided comparable performance to RAID 1 while reducing the storage footprint required for object replica capacity by 50%, offering a cost-effective, high-performance solution.
- RDMA Advantage: Leveraging Remote Directory Memory Access (RDMA) boosted performance for write and mixed workloads by 25%, while reducing CPU utilization by 18%.
The findings in this paper showcase how VMware vSAN ESA and Samsung PM1743 NVMe SSDs can unlock the full potential of hyperconverged storage, enabling enterprises to achieve optimal performance and resource utilization.
Given the vast landscape of options and considerations to be made when choosing NVMe SSDs for vSAN ESA, this white paper provides valuable insight and guidance needed to navigate the complexity. Download the white paper today to make informed decisions that align with your business’ unique infrastructure requirements.
