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BP1024 Scaling and Best Practices for Virtual Workload Environments with the FS7500 24
Figure 17 Increase in read throughput with increase in number of hosts
When the number of hosts increased, we saw an increase in aggregate read throughput measured.
The figure above shows that doubling the hosts almost doubled (194%) the read throughput. The
FS7500 can deliver the optimal levels of read and write throughput based on appliance and disk
configuration. Multiple ESX hosts are required to maximize the throughput offered by FS7500.
3.4.5 VMware specific recommendations
VMware provides Best practices recommendations to optimize performance for NFS datastores. These
Best practices are available in the following document:
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMware_NFS_BestPractices_WP_EN.pdf
In our tests we did not see much of a network throughput improvement by implementing these
recommendations. However, this may be because we did not exceed 16 datastores which might not
be enough datastores to show improvement in performance from the parameter tuning
recommended in the above document.
We conducted sequential read and write I/O tests from a single ESXi host connecting to 16 data stores
mounted to the same NFS export via eight NAS service IP addresses. The ESXi vSwitch was configured
with four NIC uplinks with an IP hash-based load balancing policy. In both tests, the throughput rate
observed was approximately the same. The following figures show performance with the
recommendations implemented and without the recommendations implemented (default values).
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1 2
Read Throughput (MBps)
Number of hosts