As part of the SLA, calculate the IOPS per TB achievable and make this known to the application owners. As part of designing your storage environment, we recommend you specify an SLA for each type of data store that is backed by a different class of storage (or different storage policy). However, the calculation can become a little more complicated when features such as array auto-tiering, compression, and de-duplication are used. This makes it very easy to explain to application owners what performance they should expect from their storage related back to the capacity. The IOPS for a particular data store is usually measured and specified in terms of IOPS per TB.
#VMWARE ESXI 5 MAXIMUMS PLUS#
For example, if each SQL Server consumes six LUNs or data stores and you can support four SQL Servers per host, your vSphere cluster would be limited to 10 hosts, plus one host for failure. Ultimately the number of data stores you need depends on how many IOPS you can get from a single data store, the combined IOPS and queue depth (QD) requirement of the VMs, and the queue depth you have configured per LUN on each vSphere host. This is one of the great benefits of using VMFS data stores over RDMs. For SQL Servers that will have a low IO requirement, you may be able to host a number of them on a single data store. The maximum number of data stores per host is 256, and all data stores should be visible to all hosts in a single cluster to ensure features such as VMware HA and DRS function correctly. The number of data stores you specify for your SQL Servers has a direct impact on the number of VMs and hosts that you can support in a vSphere cluster. Number of Data Stores and Data Store Queues We will cover the impacts of number of data stores, data store queues, storage performance quality of service (QoS), storage device multipathing, RAID, and storage array features such as auto-tiering.
This section will build on what we’ve covered already and help you to design an underlying storage architecture that supports your high-performance SQL Server systems on top of it. We are now ready to dive into VMware vSphere storage design and physical storage design to achieve maximum performance. We have so far covered SQL Server VM storage architecture from the database down to the data store. Learn More Buy vSphere Storage Design for Maximum SQL Performance
Here are the virtual machines configuration maximums: Virtual machines using virtual machine hardware versions prior to this can still be created and run on ESXi 5.5 hosts, but they will not have all of the features and capabilities of virtual machine hardware version 10. Note that you will need to use vSphere Web Client in order to configure a virtual machine to use the hardware version 10. Here is a table that shows the highest hardware version that each vSphere version supports: Product By default, new virtual machines will be created with the latest version of the virtual hardware available on the host where the VM is being created. The virtual machine hardware version designates the features of the virtual hardware (number of CPUs, maximum memory configuration, etc.). You can also add multiple USB devices to a virtual machine that resides on an ESXi host to which the devices are attached. You can configure virtual machine memory and CPU settings, add virtual hard disks and network interface cards, add and configure virtual hardware, such as CD/DVD drives, floppy drives, and SCSI devices.
#VMWARE ESXI 5 MAXIMUMS PORTABLE#
All virtual machines have uniform hardware, which makes virtual machines portable across VMware virtualization platforms. Each guest operating system sees ordinary hardware devices and is no aware that these devices are virtual.