Plain Virtualization

Recently I met with a customer who was genuinely frustrated. Their monitoring tools were showing massive, unexplained spikes in utilization across their storage controllers. Naturally, the immediate assumption was that the hardware was failing or undersized. They were ready to throw more money at a storage "problem" that didn't actually exist. It wasn't until we sat down in person and I dug into their VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure)  environment that the truth came out. The hardware was fine; the best practices  were missing. As Solution Architects and Consultants, our job isn't just to sell boxes—it’s to educate. We need to ensure customers don't misidentify software misconfigurations as hardware limitations. In the world of VDI, performance is often a matter of "prudent design" rather than just "faster disks." The "Storm" Before the Calm: Managing the Boot Storm Think of your VDI environment like a highway at ru...

A friend of mine asked me this question: "Any idea roughly how much IOPS should we estimate for a VM? My estimate is about 400 IOPS per VM – taking physical server for comparison. SAS disk is about 200 IOPS and typically, a server would have 2xHDD for OS, so total IOPS is about 400 IOPS. However, this number can be quite big especially if we have many VMs. I’m now struggling with provisioning more capacity than needed for VMware environment to meet the IOPS requirement. This actually drive up the storage cost." My reply as was follows after a short thinking: Correction. Typically server with RAID 1 does not have 2 x IOPS. It has 1 x IOPS. Its not writing to two HDDs but its mirror to one by the raid controller. Two things to note. Yes take the physical server IOPS using the worse scenario; 1. for database server, 2. for a normal app server. Size two types of datastores, 1. with higher IOPS cater for database; 2. for normal app server. If you can use SSD ...