Dell EqualLogic FS7500 Manual

Also see for FS7500: Overview Technical manual Installation and setup Hardware setup

Contents

Dell EqualLogic FS7500 Manual Manual pdf 11 page image

Dell EqualLogic FS7500 – Unified block and file storage for virtual workloadsPage 9Together these metrics can be used to quantify performance at the application level. Both of theseperformance metrics are related to each other. When the storage system reaches its performancelimits, the transactional performance and latency values are often found to be in an inverserelationship. As latency increases, transactional performance decreases because of the increased timerequired to process each I/O. However, when the system is underutilized, transactional performancecan increase without dramatically affecting latency. As a result, when assessing the performance of astorage system near saturation, it is sufficient to measure the application transactional performance atan acceptable quality of service (QoS) level that is typically defined by a maximum applicationtransaction response time.Test MethodologyOur test environment was structured to provide insight into the scalability of VMware virtualenvironments supporting multiple simultaneous workloads and VMware-specific virtual infrastructureoperations.In this test environment, we deployed a pair of FS7500 controllers and the VM host servers withsufficient CPU, memory and network resources to avoid any bottlenecks in these subsystems. In termsof hardware, we varied only the storage configuration to understand the impact of increasing storagecapacity in the configuration. For each storage configuration, we increased the workload and noted theapplication transaction throughputs and response times. In our test results, we focused on quantifyingapplication transactional performance while maintaining a steady virtualization infrastructure activityas well as maintaining an acceptable application QoS.Figure 3 depicts a VMware environment with multiple virtual workloads hosted on an EqualLogicFS7500. This is the overall layout of the test environment.