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Fast and Easy Disk Workload Characterization on VMware ESX Server

Created on: Feb 28, 2008 12:00 AM by VMworld Team - Last Modified:  Jul 24, 2009 2:32 PM by VMworld Team

Session Details

Session ID:

AP09

Session Title:

Fast and Easy Disk Workload Characterization on VMware ESX Server

Session Abstract:

Application performance can be very sensitive to the parameters of the underlying disk subsystem. Therefore, understanding disk I/O workload characteristics for enterprise applications is very important to IT organizations. For example, to optimize RAID stripe size for a particular application requires the knowledge of the size of I/Os generated by the application. Previously, such characterization has been performed either within an operating system using intrusive drivers or outside the system using special hardware.
The session will also demonstrate an efficient implementation of first-level disk I/O workload characterization using online histograms in VMware ESX Server. This allows transparent and online collection of essential workload characteristics for arbitrary, unmodified operating systems running in virtual machines. These capabilities bring disk workload characterization within the grasp of IT administrators thus lowering the bar to application specific tuning.

Track:

Application Workloads and System Performance

Session Type:

Technical Deep-dive Session

Keywords:

Storage / Backup; Test and Development; VMware Infrastructure

Duration:

60 minutes

Speaker(s):

Irfan Ahmad, VMware

Tags: sessions_performance, sessions_application, sessions_server



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