28 Nov 2012
By Yendis

VMware VMFS: Technical Overview and Best Practices

VMware, , ,
The VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) is a high performance cluster file system that allows virtualization to scale beyond the boundaries of a single system. This paper gives a technology overview of VMFS, including a discussion of features and their benefits. The paper highlights how VMFS capabilities enable greater scalability and decreased management overhead. It also provides best practices and architectural considerations for deployment of VMFS. Download http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vmfs-best-practices-wp.pdf Source: VMware
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12 Nov 2012
By Yendis

Storage performance – IOPS & Latency

Storage, ,
Storage I/O bottlenecks can have a big impact on virtual environments and can wreak havoc on the performance of the virtual machines within them. The guest operating systems and applications running inside VMs are constantly reading and writing to and from their virtual disks and anything that delays this can slow a VM to a crawl. Of all the resources a host manages, traditional storage devices are typically the slowest resource because they rely on mechanical spinning hard disks. In addition shared storage arrays are commonly used in virtual environments because of the many features that require shared storage and…
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02 Nov 2012
By Yendis

What is RAID?

Hardware,
I've had a number of emails asking me to provide details about RAID well here goes I think I've covered everything. RAID is a group of independent physical disks that provides high performance by increasing the number of drives used for saving and accessing data. A RAID disk subsystem improves I/O performance and data availability. The physical disk group appears to the host system either as a single storage unit or multiple logical units. Data throughput improves because several disks are accessed simultaneously. RAID systems also improve data storage availability and fault tolerance. Data loss caused by a physical disk failure…
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