Netapp and VMware 4.1 SIOC

dandillharsch — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 07:01:04 GMT

Anyone out there have information or recommendations regarding the vmware 4.1 storage i/o control feature in netapp environments?

This is the whitepaper that explains the details of SIOC:

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMW-vSphere41-SIOC.pdf

It seems that if I had a single lun or volume on a single netapp raid group then it would be a no-brainer to enable this feature. (one to one ratio between a vmware lun and set of spindles – no concurrency)

However, we have multiple vmware luns/volumes striped across a given raid group/aggregate along with other non-vmware workloads on those aggregates. For this scenario I’m not sure if enabling SIOC would be a plus or a minus. It also seems that such a setup would be common in netapp-land so I figured I’d see if anyone else has looked into this.

My default action would be to leave it not enabled (default) but I certainly don’t want to leave any storage/vmware benefits sitting unused.

Thoughts?

Re: Netapp and VMware 4.1 SIOC

ekashpureff — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 00:27:58 GMT

SIOC would help if you're pounding on any given data store from a number of ESX hosts.

SIOC won't kick in until you start getting greater than the trigger latency on a given LUN/data store.

I don't see any issue with turning it on by default.

I hope this response has been helpful to you.

At your service,

Eugene E. Kashpureff
ekashp@kashpureff.org
Senior Systems Architect / NetApp Certified Instructor
http://www.linkedin.com/in/eugenekashpureff

(P.S. I appreciate points for helpful or correct answers.)

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Netapp and VMware 4.1 SIOC

Re: Netapp and VMware 4.1 SIOC