This paper shows the performance of PMEM on vSphere 6.7:
- We explain how PMEM can be configured and used in a vSphere environment.
- We describe our experimental setup and various PMEM configurations used.
- We show how applications with different characteristics can take advantage of PMEM in vSphere. Below are some of the use cases:
- How PMEM device limits can be achieved under vSphere with little to no overhead of virtualization. We show the virtual-to-native ratio along with raw bandwidth and latency numbers from fio, an I/O microbenchmark.
- How traditional relational databases like Oracle can benefit from using PMEM in vSphere.
- How scaling-out VMs in vSphere can benefit from PMEM. We used Sysbench with MySQL to show such benefits.
- How modifying applications (PMEM-aware) can get the best performance out of PMEM. We show performance data from such applications, including an OLTP database like SQL Server and an in-memory database like Redis.
- Using vMotion to migrate VMs with PMEM which is a host-local device just like NVMe SSDs. We also characterize, in detail, vMotion performance of VMs with PMEM.
- We outline some best practices on how to get the most out of PMEM in vSphere.
Please see the attached performance study, below.