Meeting higher I/O needs with the VMware Paravirtual controller
Virtual machine hardware Version 7 introduced a new VMware Paravirtual storage adapter (PVSCSI). It is considered a high-performance storage adapter recommended for VMs with high I/O usage. PVSCSI can handle high I/O with higher storage throughput while keeping CPU utilization low.
Note
In ESXi 4, the LSI Logic adapter performs better than PVSCSI for VMs doing less than 2,000 IOPS.
More details are available in the VMware KB 1017652 article at http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1017652.
The following operating systems support PVSCSI:
- Windows Server 2003
- Windows Server 2008
- Windows Server 2008 R2
- Windows Server 2012
- Windows Server 2012 R2
- Windows 8
- Red Hat Linux 5
These operating systems don't include drivers for PVSCSI by default and the drivers have to be loaded before the virtual disk is recognized during OS installation.
How to do it...
The best option is to choose the Paravirtual SCSI controller during VM creation. New virtual drives using...