On Wednesday I attended the VMFS3 session entitled “VMware vStorage VMFS-3: Architectural Advances since ESX 3.0″. It was a very interesting little session discussing some of the under-the-covers work through the evolution of VMFS3.
However, why am I blogging about it now? Well one thing jumped out at me during the presentation. The speaker (I think it was Satyam Vaghani), introduced a slide which showed the testing that they were doing on the next implementation of VMFS3 (3.45). To be honest I can’t remember the exact detail of the slide (and unfortunately the uploaded version currently on the VMworld site doesn’t have the same slide), but what I do recall is the upper limits of the testing. The slide was showing the effects of new locking mechanisms. It showed the performance of 8 hosts connecting to 512 VM on 1 VMFS LUN! Holy smoke. Ka-Pow. Imagine being able to do that.
What sort of effect would that have on your datastore provisioning? Time to re-think your VDI solution? I can’t wait 
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You got it! BTW, we stopped at 8 hosts because we ran out of storage hardware (I believe we were consuming a little over 3 TB at that point). Oh, and I’d like to point out that the new locking mechanisms will work on existing VMFS volume too, so you can squeeze out more from your existing setups.
Thanks Satyam, I really enjoyed the session.
VMFS 3.x scales a lot better than a lot of people think… I need to see this presentation online as soon as it’s available!