2 x Intel Xeon Gold 6130 2.1GhZ

384 GB DDR4 2666 RAM

2 x 800GB Write Intensive SAS SSD

10 x 3.84TB Read Intensive SAS SSD

1 x HBA330 Controller

It was a fairly standard / generic DEMO system and not remotely a maxed out P-Series configuration. There is still a lot of room to grow in terms of additional cache drives and capacity drives. Think of this as a baseline of roughly what you could get.

The benchmark tests were done using a synthetic load generator, HCIBench. While it is part of the VMware Fling site download, it is in no way tweaked to make vSAN look good (I promise!). I have used IOMeter as well, and results were similar. The underlying load gen of HCIBench is of the popular VDBench and all VMware have done is put a nice looking GUI on top of it and automation to make deploying VDBench faster / easier.

The tests were also done with generic out-of-the-box configurations with ZERO tweaking. The workload profile tested is a typical 70% Read 30% Write on 8k Blocks, which is common in most Enterprises. I have also used RAID 5 Erasure Coding to introduce additional overheads to simulate worst case scenarios. Would have liked to do RAID 6 but I have insufficient nodes for it. The tests were then done against multiple Outstanding IO (OIO) variables. The definition of OIO’s are IO’s waiting in queue. More OIO’s usually results in higher IOPS and potentially an increase in latency. The sweet spot for OIO’s is often the cross-over point where additional OIO’s generates marginal IOPS improvements and significant latency increase.