SERVER-SIDE CACHING FOR THE VMWARE ADMIN

HOW TO AFFORDABLY BOOST VSPHERE PERFORMANCE

ABOUT US

Sheryl Koenigsberg

Director of Product Marketing

David Davis

vExpert, VCP, CCIE, and Video Training Author

STORAGE PROBLEMS

STORAGE… THE AFTERTHOUGHT

When vSphere was new…Storage was difficult to sizeStorage performance wasn’t

as critical a factorMost companies just used

what they had

POLL QUESTION

DEMAND IS RISING!

Most of us are experiencing…> consolidation> utilizationMore applicationsMore tier-1 applications I/O intensive

applications, like VDI

INCREASED LATENCY AND IOPS

> latency> IOPS> application

responseAlso, the I/O

Blender effect is a major issue

POLL QUESTION

STORAGE SOLUTIONS

HARDWARE OPTIONS TO IMPROVE STORAGE PERFORMANCE

1. Buy new storage for vSphere

2. Upgrade the SAN/NAS- More spindles

Increase caching

Add flash storage

Implement tiering

3. Buy I/O acceleration hardware for servers

$$$$$

$

New Storage

Upgrade StorageI/O Accel

HW

Server-Side Caching

POLL QUESTION

HARDWARE OPTIONS TO IMPROVE STORAGE PERFORMANCE

VERY COSTLYHardware-basedDowntimePainful to implementNot always adding

performance where needed most

VSPHERE SERVER-SIDE CACHING

BENEFITS Reduces latency & improves I/O throughput Software-based Easy to implement (some easier than others) Much lower cost (some more-so than others)

VSPHERE SERVER-SIDE CACHING

VMware vSphere Flash Read Cache (vFRC)

SELECTING A SERVER-SIDE CACHING SOLUTION

• Low cost / affordable

• Easy to implement

• Consider hardware requirements

• Consider potential downtime• Provides massive storage performance

boost

SERVER-SIDE CACHING UTOPIA

You want…Low costLeverage existing resources (RAM)Uses the fastest storage available for caching (RAM is

faster than SSD)Minimal footprint

SERVER-SIDE CACHING UTOPIA

You want…Non-intrusiveTransparent“set it and forget it”No reboot Immediate ROI, with proof, based on your workload

INFINIO’S SOLUTION

Infinio: the price/performance leaderfor server-side cache

Optimized to run in RAM

Easy to evaluate

Operationally transparent

Infinio is optimized for RAM

Infinio takes small amounts of RAM from each node and

creates a distributed cache with SSD-like cache hit rates.

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Content-based: Inline deduplication

works across hosts for a large effective cache

Global: All nodes can access

all of the shared cache1 2 3

4 5 6

7 8 9

2 3 1

5 4 6

8 7 9

101

431

114

144

549

762

664

245

333

093

094

383

Infinio is easy to evaluate

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Download software

Double-click to install Evaluate

Procure hardware

Schedule downtime Visit colo Take down

applications

Install hardware

and drivers

Install software Configure Evaluate

Procure hardware

Schedule downtime Visit colo

Configure storage

networking

Install hardware

Install drivers/soft

ware

Migrate data Configure Evaluate

Infinio

Hardware-based server side cache

New array hardware

Schedule downtime Install software Migrate data

Reconfigure snapshots, clones,

and backups

Reconfigure datastores and

ACLsEvaluate

Other memory-based caches

22

Infinio is operationally transparent

ESXi

VM

VM VM

VM

Datastoreconfiguration

Snapshots and replication

Backupscripts

VAAI operations

vMotion

Infinio

ESXi

Operations remain the same once Infinio is installed

This

slid

e is

ani

mat

ed

Let’s look at a VMware environment

23

…with Infinio installed

24

8 GB of RAMper host

1 Accelerator VM per ESX host

1 Management Console VM per vCenter

Communication runs over the vMotion network

GlobalDeduplicatedContent-basedTh

is s

lide

is a

nim

ated

Get a closer look at Infinio

10X response time

65-85% reduction of read requests from storage

More consistent application performance

Q&A TIME!

WHAT ARE YOUR QUESTIONS?

THANKS FOR ATTENDING!

• To learn more about how Infinio’s Accelerator can save you time and affordably improve your storage performance, visit

www.Infinio.com