Pivot Point

I have received questions about thin provisioned disk performance since we announced their full support in vSphere.  The questions usually center around scalability issues.  VMware’s customers fear locking contention as new blocks are created for growing disks and think that growing thin disks may punish the performance of all virtual disks on a volume.  Well performance engineering has finally released a paper on the subject and we are glad to say that thin disk performance is insignificantly different from thick disks.

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As I continue working with VMware’s Professional Services Organization (PSO) as they develop a performance troubleshooting service, I see repeats of a theme I wrote about a couple of months ago:  storage is causing most performance problems, not VMware.  In fact, I have yet to see a correctly-configured vSphere deployment that is running any application with unsatisfactory performance with respect to native.

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