Description:

vSphere 5 combined with vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) allows for the creation of shared storage from local storage. This enables the use of vSphere features like vMotion, distributed resource scheduling (DRS), and high availability (HA) without a SAN. The performance of VSA is directly related to the hardware configuration of the systems used for its cluster. Big differences in capacity, performance, and price exist depending on the exact configuration used. The data replication performed by VSA across its cluster nodes provides high availability, but also has an effect on performance. Testing was done with a mixed workload to examine application performance and infrastructure operations. A set of tests with an I/O generation tool were also run to examine what happens across the hosts in a VSA cluster and to illustrate how to monitor and manage performance.