Tag: IOPS

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Demystifying IO Operation Readouts in ESXi

This doesn’t come up very often these days, but every once and awhile it does and every time it does, I look to see if we have documentation on it and there never seems to be. After writing this post I did find a forum post where my friend Drew answers it there too. Well anyways let’s quickly explain the situation.

Most block vendors these days tell customers to change their path switching policy for their storage in ESXi from the default of Round Robin (1,000) to 1. This makes ESXi switches logical paths for a given device after every I/O instead of every 1,000. The reason I say this doesn’t come up much anymore is that in modern version of ESXi (6.0 express patch+, 6.5 U1+ and 6.7+) we (Pure) have rules in ESXi that makes sure this is set by default without any user configuration. Many other vendors do as well.

Anyways, when using VMware tools to see if a device is configured properly, depending on how it is set, it can readout differently.

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ESXi IO Operations Limit Parameter and IO Balance

Quick post here. I am working on updating some documentation and I wanted to add a bit more color to a section on changing the IO Operations limit for ESXi NMP Round Robin devices. The Pure Storage recommendation is to change this value to one from the default of 1,000. Therefore, ESXi will switch logical paths after each I/O instead of 1,000. There are some performance benefits to this and some evidence for improved failover time (in the case of a path failure) with this setting. I am not going to get into the veracity of these benefits right now. What I wanted to share here is that there is no doubt changing this to 1 makes a big difference to I/O balance on the array itself. Continue reading “ESXi IO Operations Limit Parameter and IO Balance”

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VMware PowerCLI and Pure Storage

This is a post I plan on just updating on a rolling basis. I have been working on updating the vSphere and Pure Storage Best Practices document and there are few settings that can be tweaked to increase performance. A common question I have and occasionally receive is can this be easily simplified or automated? Of course! And PowerCLI is the best option in most cases–I will continue to add to this post or update it as I find newer or better ways of doing things.

****UPDATED SCRIPTS AND NEW FUNCTIONALITY check out this blog post for insight****

Update: get my scripts on my GitHub page here:

https://github.com/codyhosterman/powercli

flasharray

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Changing the default VMware Round Robin IO Operation Limit value for Pure Storage FlashArray devices

This is a topic I have posted about in the past but this time I am going to speak about it with the Pure Storage FlashArray. Anyone familiar with the VMware Native Multipathing Plugin probably knows about the Round Robin “IOPS” value which I will interchangeably also refer to as the IO Operation Limit. This value dictates how often NMP switches paths to the device–after a configured number of I/Os NMP will move to a different path. The default value of this is 1,000 but can be changed to as low as 1. For the highest performance Pure recommends changing this setting to 1 for all devices. The tricky thing is that it has to be done for every device on every host and doing this in a simple way isn’t immediately obvious. But here is the procedure.

flasharray

 

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Changing the default IOPS value for VMware Round Robin and Symmetrix Devices

A common recommendation from storage vendors is to change the default IOPS setting for VMwares’ Native Multi-Pathing (NMP) Path Selection Policy (PSP) Round Robin. The IOPS setting controls how many I/Os are sent down a single logical path before switching to the next path. By default this number is 1,000 I/Os. The VMAX recommendation is to set this to 1. The purpose of this blog post is not to debate the setting, but to help those who want to use it. Regardless, I have seen many customers benefit from this recommendation. Once they see a benefit they want to know–can I make this setting a default?

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