We published a paper that shows how VMware is helping advance PMEM technology by driving the virtualization enhancements in vSphere 6.7. The paper gives a detailed performance analysis of using PMEM technology on vSphere using various workloads and scenarios.
These are the key points that we cover in this white paper:
- We explain how PMEM can be configured and used in a vSphere environment.
- We show how applications with different characteristics can take advantage of PMEM in vSphere. Below are some of the use-cases:
- How PMEM device limits can be achieved under vSphere with little to no overhead of virtualization. We show virtual-to-native ratio along with raw bandwidth and latency numbers from fio, an I/O microbenchmark.
- How traditional relational databases like Oracle can benefit from using PMEM in vSphere.
- How scaling-out VMs in vSphere can benefit from PMEM. We used Sysbench with MySQL to show such benefits.
- How modifying applications (PMEM-aware) can get the best performance out of PMEM. We show performance data from such applications, e.g., an OLTP database like SQL Server and an in-memory database like Redis.
- Using vMotion to migrate VMs with PMEM which is a host-local device just like NVMe SSDs. We also characterize in detail, vMotion performance of VMs with PMEM.
- We outline some best practices on how to get the most out of PMEM in vSphere.