Understanding storage performance

Saturating the underlying storage hardware often causes storage performance issues. Disk intensive applications could saturate the storage and/or the path. To determine whether your vSphere environment is experiencing storage issues you need to monitor disk latency. Storage I/O Control, discussed in Chapter 6, Advanced vSphere Infrastructure Management, can be used to determine if a latency threshold is exceeded. Ensure that your storage can meet the I/O demands of the virtual machines. Consider using SSD solutions as a means of removing the disk spindle from the equation. Using a disk cache approach can increase the IOPS that your storage is capable of. Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) is a common metric used to judge overall storage performance. Shares may also be used to prioritize virtual machine access to storage resources.