Virtual SAN is a VMware storage solution that is tightly integrated with vSphere—making storage setup and maintenance in a vSphere virtualized environment fast and flexible. Virtual SAN 6.2 adds several features and improvements, including additional data integrity with software checksum, space efficiency features of RAID-5 and RAID-6, deduplication and compression, and an in-memory client read cache.
We ran several tests to compare the performance of Virtual SAN 6.1 and 6.2 to make sure they were on par with each other.
In addition, we wanted to know how new feature performance compared to a 6.2 baseline with no new features enabled. The tests used benchmark workloads that simulate real-world activities in online stores and brokerage firms (online transaction processing, or OLTP) and in a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment. We published the test results in the following papers:
- VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 Performance with Online Transaction Processing Workloads
- VMware Virtual SAN 6.2 Performance with Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Workloads
One such test used a workload that simulated typical user actions in an online brokerage application. We used a 4-host cluster with 3 VMs on each host, for a total of 12 VMs. The following graphs show the virtual machines’ IOPs per host and disk space usage saving for the Brokerage workload.
6.2 R5 (RAID-5 configured) maintains almost the same IOPs per host as 6.2 but brings down the space usage in the cluster from about 3200GiB to 2280GiB—that is 29% space saving. 6.2 D, which has deduplication and compression enabled, brings IOPs down by 25% to about 30,000, but meanwhile saves 88% disk space, taking only 373GiB on the disks. In the 6.2 R5+D case, where RAID-5 is used together with deduplication and compression, IOPs are down further by 11% to 25,000. However, the disk space saving is 92%, using only 261GiB space in the cluster.
Please note that the substantial space saving is observed because each Brokerage workload virtual machine contains duplicable and compressible data that can be reduced significantly by the deduplication and compression feature in Virtual SAN 6.2. (The actual space saving in your production environment will depend on the workload.)
Read more test results and find more information about test configuration in the published papers for OLTP and VDI workloads.