In the previous article, I’ve described 3 scenarios for testing NVMe-oF performance and skimmed through their hardware and software configuration. Again, what I wanna do, is measure how virtualization influences the NVMe-oF performance (maybe, it doesn’t at all). For this, I’m gonna examine how NVMe-oF performs on a bare metal configuration, and on an infrastructure with Hyper-V and ESXi deployed. In each case, I’ll also evaluate the performance of iSER transport using LIO and SPDK iSCSI. Now that you have the overall understanding of the project, it’s time to move on to configuring our testing environment.

There’s a common opinion that the performance in general and IOPS-intensive performance like NVMe over Fabrics is usually lower in virtualized environments due to the hypervisor overhead. Therefore, I’ve decided to run a series of tests to prove or knock down this belief. For this purpose, I’ll have three scenarios for measuring the performance of NVMe over Fabrics in different infrastructures: fist – on a bare metal configuration, second – with Microsoft Hyper-V deployed on the client server, and finally, with ESXi 6.5.

Everyone knows that, currently, the SSDs are one of the best storage devices that allow you to upgrade your architecture and significantly accelerate the performance of the computer. SSD accelerates the loading speed of your PC, applications opening and files searching speed, and generally increases the performance of your system. Despite the fact that solid-state drives are more expensive than standard hard drives, the performance improvement can hardly be overlooked.

The reason for writing this post was a recent case from one of our customers, who ran into an issue when their SAN switch failed. The problem was that their VMs were generating an enormous amount of errors that were caused by the switching of active paths at the time of failover.

This article is intended to introduce you to the main concepts and features of Fibre Channel (FC), the high-speed network technology and a relevant family of standards (protocols) for storage networking that was standardized in 1994.

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is a new storage feature introduced in Windows Server 2016 Datacenter, which significantly extends the Software-Defined Storage stack in Windows Server product family and allows users building highly available storage systems using directly attached drives. Storage Spaces Direct, or S2D, simplifies the deployment and management of Software-Defined Storage systems and allows using more disk devices classes like SATA and NVMe drives. Previously, it was not possible to use these types of storage with clustered Storage Spaces with shared disks. Storage Spaces Direct can use drives that are locally attached to nodes in a cluster or disks that are attached to nodes using enclosure. It aggregates all the disks into a single Storage Pool and enables the creation of virtual disks on top.