Hello dear reader,
As you know VMware has announced some time ago the vsphere 5 and finally it can be downloaded by anyone 
Based on this i decided to test the performance of the 3 types of disks supported by VMware :
Basically the VM had 2 virtual disks assigned for the benchmark :
- Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed
- Thick Provision Eager Zeroed
- Thin Provision
Test setup :
One VM has been configured with 2 vcpu’s, 2 GB ram and 4 disks, all using the LSI SAS SCSI Controller :
- Disk 01 is the Windows “disk” (c:\ drive)
- Disk 02 it’s a Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed disk
- Disk 03 it’s a Thick Provision Eager Zeroed disk
- Disk 04 it’s a Thin Provision disk
The VM had 1 Gigabit link without any sort of redundancy, link aggregation, no MPIO , no jumbo frames to an ISCSI storage. The purpose of this exercise is to see the performance differences between the 3 types of disks and not to see the performance of the ISCSI storage .
Anyway….let’s go for the results
Results : ( results parsed at http://vmktree.org/iometer/ )
- I/O of a Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed disk
| Test name | Latency | Avg iops | Avg MBps | cpu load |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Max Throughput-100%Read | 0.00 | 3491 | 109 | 3% |
| RealLife-60%Rand-65%Read | 12.87 | 4490 | 25 | 11% |
| Max Throughput-50%Read | 101.44 | 6190 | 193 | 15% |
| Random-8k-70%Read | 13.96 | 5681 | 44 | 17% |
- I/O of a Thick Provision Eager Zeroed disk
| Test name | Latency | Avg iops | Avg MBps | cpu load |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Max Throughput-100%Read | 0.00 | 3511 | 109 | 1% |
| RealLife-60%Rand-65%Read | 12.78 | 4460 | 34 | 30% |
| Max Throughput-50%Read | 102.88 | 6261 | 195 | 2% |
| Random-8k-70%Read | 14.19 | 5770 | 45 | 34% |
- I/O of a Thin Provision disk
| Test name | Latency | Avg iops | Avg MBps | cpu load |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Max Throughput-100%Read | 0.00 | 3530 | 110 | 0% |
| RealLife-60%Rand-65%Read | 13.06 | 4566 | 35 | 30% |
| Max Throughput-50%Read | 102.36 | 6243 | 195 | 2% |
| Random-8k-70%Read | 14.17 | 5767 | 45 | 36% |
Conclusion :
It seems like VMware has quite similar performance across different types of disks (at least with the used benchmark profile for this test) and for me the Thin Provision disk would probably be the chosen one due to the fact of being…Thin .
During the next days/weeks i will try to get some more tests, against different storage devices and using ISCSI and NFS .
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