VMware Virtual SAN 6.1 introduced the concept of a stretched cluster which allows the Virtual SAN customer to configure two geographically located sites, while synchronously replicating data between the two sites. A technical white paper about the Virtual SAN stretched cluster performance has now been published. This paper provides guidelines on how to get the best performance for applications deployed on a Virtual SAN stretched cluster environment.

The chart below, borrowed from the white paper, compares the performance of the Virtual SAN 6.1 stretched cluster deployment against the regular Virtual SAN cluster without any fault domains. A nine- node Virtual SAN stretched cluster is considered with two different configurations of inter-site latency: 1ms and 5ms. The DVD Store benchmark is executed on four virtual machines on each host of the nine-node Virtual SAN stretched cluster. The DVD Store performance metrics of cumulated orders per minute in the cluster, read/write IOPs, and average latency are compared with a similar workload on the regular Virtual SAN cluster. The orders per minute (OPM) is lower by 3% and 6% for the 1ms and 5ms inter-site latency stretched cluster compared to the regular Virtual SAN cluster.

Figure 1a.  DVD Store orders per minute in the cluster and guest IOPS comparison

Guest read/write IOPS and latency were also monitored. The read/write mix ratio for the DVD Store workload is roughly at 1/3 read and 2/3 write. Write latency shows an obvious increase trend when the inter-site latency is higher, while the read latency is only marginally impacted. As a result, the average latency increases from 2.4ms to 2.7ms, and 5.1ms for 1ms and 5ms inter-site latency configuration.

Figure 1b.  DVD Store latency comparison

These results demonstrate that the inter-site latency in a Virtual SAN stretched cluster deployment has a marginal performance impact on a commercial workload like DVD Store. More results are available in the white paper.