Storage Workload Characterization and Consolidation in Virtualized Enviornments

Storage Workload Characterization and Consolidation in Virtualized Enviornments

This paper presents workload characterization study of three top-tier enterprise applications using VMware ESX

server hypervisor. We further separate out different components (for example data, index and redo log in a database)

of these workloads to understand their behavior in isolation. We find that most workloads show highly random access

patterns. Next, we study the impact of storage consolidation on workloads (both random and sequential) and

their burstiness.

Attachments
Comments

The work presented in this paper is still hard to find anywhere else.

Detailed workload characterization of DVDStore (Oracle), Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, TPC-C (Oracle) and Swingbench (Oracle) are presented, all in one paper!

Furthermore, section 4 of this paper contains nuggets such as how these workloads behave when run on the same storage array LUNs. I highly recommend this as basic reading for storage and system administrators looking to benefit from the CapEx and OpEx savings of workload consolidation with VMFS or NFS in any environment.

Irfan

Version history
Revision #:
1 of 1
Last update:
‎06-02-2009 05:21 PM
Updated by: