VMWare ESXi 5.5 on AFF

[UberKV]

Hi

I'm in the process of replacing current FAS6280 controllers with AFF. These are used for a large VSI environment hosting over 2000 VMs and I am currently struggling with disk activity always >95%, b2b CPs, and de-dupe running 24/7 due to the amount of FC LUNs I am hosting (~250).

Does anyone have any perfermance results of VMWare on AFF in a similar environment?

Thanks

[andris]

Hi,

You didn't mention which exact AFF model you're getting...

Based on your description of your performance bottlenecks a new AFF system should mitigate those bottlenecks, nicely.

I would request some performance modeling estimates for your new AFF system from your NetApp sales rep.

[jonathon_lanzon]

You mentioned your current pain points on your spinning disk based system being "disk activity always >95%, b2b CPs, and de-dupe running 24/7".

99% of the time the AFF will definitely resolve this. An AFF is flash optimised, it bypasses layers in the RAID system to drastically improve latency/speed when writing to disk. When you add the fast IOP/low latency performance of flash, you should see an eliminaction in b2b CPs. Also take note that flash is more resiliant to a "full file system" than spinning disk. As your available capacity reduces the system doesn't need to keep seeking the disk subsystem for free space.

AFF also introduces inline-dedupe (at an aggregate level if you get on to 9.2), which will exponentially improve your post-dedupe performance.

Overall, moving to an AFF *should* be a good move for you. But definitely get advice from your SE/partner that is specific to your environment.