A performance study shows that VMware vSphere 5.5 with Virtual SAN as the storage backend provides an excellent platform for virtualized deployments of SAP IQ Multiplex Servers.

We created four virtual machines with the RHEL 6.3 operating system, and these virtual machines made up the SAP IQ Multiplex Server, which used Virtual SAN as its storage backend. In order to measure performance, we looked at the distributed query processing (DQP) modes of SAP IQ. In DQP, work is performed by threads running on both leader and worker nodes, and intermediate results are transmitted between these nodes through a shared disk space, or over an inter-node network. In the paper, we refer to these modes as storage-transfer and network-transfer.

In a test consisting of concurrent streams of queries designed to emulate a multi-user scenario, we found that the read-heavy I/O profile of this workload takes full advantage of the Virtual SAN’s flash acceleration layer. Data read from magnetic disks in each disk group, is cached in the SSD in the disk group. Since 70% of SSD capacity is reserved for the read cache, a significant amount of data is quickly placed in very low latency storage. Once it is warmed up, I/O requests are served from the read cache, leading to fast query response times. Add to this SAP IQ’s ability to use network resources to handle intermediate results transfer and we get an additional bump in throughput since we no longer have the overhead of writing intermediate, shared results to disk.

Read more about Distributed Query Processing in SAP IQ on VMware vSphere and Virtual SAN.