Description:

This paper compares the performance of various storage protocols available on VMware vSphere„¢ 4. The protocols Fibre Channel, Hardware iSCSI, Software iSCSI, and NFS are tested using Iometer in virtual machines on an ESX 4.0 host. The Fibre Channel experiments were conducted over a 4Gb Fibre Channel network. The Hardware iSCSI, Software iSCSI, and NFS experiments were conducted over a Gigabit Ethernet connection. This paper includes key aspects of the test environment, performance results for throughput and CPU cost, and key findings of the experiments.