We have two FAS3240's running in HA. One of our shelves has 24 - 600 GB 15k SAS drives. Performance has been decreasing as more and more VMs are added. Plans are to purchase an additional shelf filled with the same drives and do some type of caching.
First, I have no idea how to figure out how many IOPS this shelf can handle. Based on our monitoring software it seems to average about 1.7k IOPS. There should be about 170 VMs running on this shelf. Quite a few of them running SQL.
We have a few new ESXi servers setup in vCenter 5.5 and started using VMware Flash Cache which you have to enable and allocate per VM. I'm not really sure how to even test the performance gains from this caching other than our clients are happy.
We were thinking about a more centralized SSD caching that could benefit all VMs running on our Tier 1 storage. One option is the NetApp Flash Cache. Last time we got a quote for this over a year ago, it was $17k for a 512 GB PCI Express card, and we would need two. We are going to get new pricing and hopefully it has at least dropped in half.
I have heard of PernixData, but never used it and don't know the pricing as of right now, but I would like more than just 512 GB of SSD caching since we have about 5 TB of Tier 1 storage currently in use.
How would you compare the SSD caching between NetApp and PernixData and maybe another product you have tested? Which would you go with or think is the best performance gain for the cost.
First, I have no idea how to figure out how many IOPS this shelf can handle. Based on our monitoring software it seems to average about 1.7k IOPS. There should be about 170 VMs running on this shelf. Quite a few of them running SQL.
We have a few new ESXi servers setup in vCenter 5.5 and started using VMware Flash Cache which you have to enable and allocate per VM. I'm not really sure how to even test the performance gains from this caching other than our clients are happy.
We were thinking about a more centralized SSD caching that could benefit all VMs running on our Tier 1 storage. One option is the NetApp Flash Cache. Last time we got a quote for this over a year ago, it was $17k for a 512 GB PCI Express card, and we would need two. We are going to get new pricing and hopefully it has at least dropped in half.
I have heard of PernixData, but never used it and don't know the pricing as of right now, but I would like more than just 512 GB of SSD caching since we have about 5 TB of Tier 1 storage currently in use.
How would you compare the SSD caching between NetApp and PernixData and maybe another product you have tested? Which would you go with or think is the best performance gain for the cost.