P320h PCIe SSD Boot Storm Testing in Virtualized Environments

Micron Technology, Inc. Technical Marketing Brief

As data center users continue to grow within corporate enterprise environments, IT managers may struggle with allocating new server resources to support them: purchasing, conguring, and maintaining servers costs time and money, and the potential for system downtime can add to these costs. To reduce these expenses while maintaining their user base, IT managers are starting to turn toward hardware virtualization solutionsthe use of software to migrate computer environments (creating virtual machines) to enable users to share hardware resources and allow numerous small servers to be replaced by one larger server, ultimately reducing hardware costs and saving maintenance time and expense. Microns P320h PCIe solid state drive (SSD) is architected to be used as a virtual storage device in VMware to support these virtualization solutions. This technical brief provides an overview of using the P320h as a virtual storage device in VMware and describes how the P320h performs in comparison to traditional deployments using a standard hard disk drive (HDD) and a network area storage (NAS) device when handling a common system performance issue known as a boot storm event.

What is a Boot Storm Event?

A boot storm event occurs when numerous users (either physical machines or VMs congured in VMware) all boot simultaneously from a shared storage device, causing excess trafc and temporary strain on system storage, network, and CPU resources. Depending on the physical constraints of these resources, these events can result in extremely long boot times for the average user. These long boot times can result in a loss of productivity, costing organizations both time and money.

Boot Storm Testing

Micron tested the behavior of several VMs on a system using a P320h, an HDD, and a NAS ler, and tracked each storage devices behavior during a boot storm event. In Microns boot storm tests, three pools of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) VMs were created utilizing a single VMware ESX host server and separate NAS device, as shown in Figure 1 on the next page. Three pools consisting of 45 VMs each were created: VM pool 1 resided on the P320h installed in the local VMware ESX host server VM pool 2 resided on a standard HDD installed in the same local VMware ESX host server VM pool 3 resided on a NAS filer 650GB RAID volume connected to the ESX host server via a 10 Gb/E link Each VM represents a users desktop system running Microsoft Windows. The three storage pools reect a total of 135 virtualized user desktop systems.

The P320h as a Virtual Storage Device

The P320h SCSI driver supports the VMware ESX kernel environment, enabling the P320h to appear as a virtual storage device, or datastore, within the VMware vCenter or vSphere framework. Virtual machines (VMs) created on an ESX host server using the P320h can not only take advantage of the P320hs faster performance compared to HDD or NAS storage devices, but can also outperform these storage devices during boot storm events.

P320h PCIe SSD Boot Storm Testing in Virtualized Environments

Figure 1: Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Conguration

ESX Server HP DL380 with 148GB local DRAM 2 Intel Xeon X5675 (3.06 GHz/6-core/6-logical) processors, hyperthreading enabled; 24 cores total VMware ESX kernel versions: ESX 5.1 build 5.1.0.914609, host cache disabled 128GB HDD, 700GB Micron P320h HHHL PCIe SSD NetApp 6240 ler with virtual machines stored on 650GB WAFL format RAID volume with 512GB Flash cache 10 Gb/E bre link between ESX host server and NAS ler; 1 Gb/E copper ports VMware vCenter Operations Manager, VMware View Manager

NAS Filer Network Connection Administration Tool

Table 1: System Congurations Used for Testing To ensure consistency across the VMs, VMware View Manager was used to create VM VDI clones. This cloning wizard creates a fully provisioned, linked clone replica of a master VDI VM for each pool and then builds thinly provisioned clones from the replica. Figure 2 shows the master VM conguration. Figure 3 on the next page shows the VMware conguration for each VDI clone. 50GB of provisioned storage was shared among all 45 VDI clones in each pool.

Figure 2: Master VM Conguration

P320h PCIe SSD Boot Storm Testing in Virtualized Environments

Figure 3: VDI Clone Conguration

Results
After the VM VDI pools were created, all 45 VMs in each pool were booted at once to simulate a boot storm event. The VM pools were booted in the following order: HDD, NAS ler, P320h. Boot time was measured in two instances: Initial boot time for each VM Complete boot time for each pool

Storage Pool HDD NAS Filer P320h

Average Boot Time 9.25 minutes 54 seconds 40 seconds

Maximum Boot Time 13.5 minutes 1.07 minutes 49 seconds

Table 2: Initial Boot Times for Each VM

HDD Initial Boot Time per VM

0:15:50 0:14:24 0:12:58 0:11:31 0:10:05 0:08:38 0:07:12 0:05:46 0:04:19 0:02:53 0:01:26 0:00:00 0 10 20 30
VDI VMs

Initial Boot Time Results

The initial boot time for each VM represents the time it takes for VMware to initially boot each system (the time was measured as the difference from when the VM was booted by VMware to the time when system conguration scripts were run on the VM. At this time, Windows runs various background processes to prepare the system for user access, and therefore, the system is not available to the user). The initial boot time data is summarized in the following table and shown in Figures 46.
Duration (Minutes/Seconds)

40

45

Figure 4: Initial Boot Time per VMHDD Results

P320h PCIe SSD Boot Storm Testing in Virtualized Environments

NAS Initial Boot Time per VM

0:01:18
Duration (Minutes/Seconds)

P320h Initial Boot Time per VM

0:00:52 0:00:48
Duration (Minutes/Seconds)

0:01:09 0:01:00 0:00:52 0:00:43 0:00:35 0:00:26 0:00:17 0:00:09 0:00:00 0 5 10 15 20 25

VDI VMs

0:00:43 0:00:39 0:00:35 0:00:30 0:00:26 0:00:22 0:00:17 0:00:13 0:00:09 0:00:04 0:00:00
0 6 11 16 21 26 31 36 41 45
VDI VMs

30

35

40

45

50

Figure 5: Initial Boot Time per VMNAS Results

Complete Boot Time Results

The complete boot time represents the time it takes all VMs in the pool to complete booting and be available for user access. As shown in Figure 7, when 45 VMs were booted simultaneously on the local HDD, the boot time took approximately 40 minutes for all VMs to complete.

Figure 6: Initial Boot Time per VMP320h Results

During this time, READ latencies were greater than 78 milliseconds (ms) and WRITE latencies were greater than 50ms, the equivalent of 78,000 microseconds (s) and 50,000s, respectively.

Figure 7: Complete Boot TimeHDD Results

P320h PCIe SSD Boot Storm Testing in Virtualized Environments

As shown in the circled area of Figure 8, the NAS ler took approximately 10 minutes to boot all 45 VMsa 30-minute improvement compared with local HDD

storage. READ and WRITE latencies also improved to 490s and 700s, respectively.

Figure 8: Complete Boot TimeNAS Results

Figure 9 shows the boot storm test results for VMs stored on the P320h. The P320h took approximately 10 minutes to boot all 45 VMs. (The last spike in the graph is an

unrelated system event.) READ and WRITE latencies were 110s and 5s, respectively.

Figure 9: Complete Boot TimeP320h Results

P320h PCIe SSD Boot Storm Testing in Virtualized Environments

Conclusion
As the tests illustrate, the P320h enables the shortest boot and fastest latency times of all storage types tested. Initial boot time for a VM on the P320h averaged 40 secondsmore than 10X faster than a VM on the HDD. Complete boot time for the P320h storage pool was 10 minutes4X faster than the HDD storage pool. Latency times on the P320h improved more than 700X over local HDD storage and approximately 4X over the NAS ler. Additionally, as a virtualized storage device, the P320h lowers total cost of ownership and improves system performance at a signcantly lower price point than a NAS device. A single physical server with a P320h can host multiple user systems as VMs, reducing overall power requirements and physical storage space needs and alleviating the need to purchase new servers for users as they come online. The dynamic provision features built into the VMware virtualization environment enable reliable access and limited downtime for adding new users and contribute to improved system accessibliity and performance. Time spent booting VMs from a P320h is significantly decreased compared to an HDD, resulting in substantial productivity savings. For example, based on test results, average initial boot time for a VM user is reduced from 9.25 minutes for an HDD to 40 seconds for the P320h. For one user who earns $20.00 per hour, this equates to $2.86 in savings per user per boot. At 10 boots per week, this is a savings of $28.60 a week or $1,430.00 a year. In a VDI implementation of 100 users, this results in productivity savings of $143,000 per year.
Minutes Booting (One VM User/Two Boots per Day) Per Day HDD NAS Filer P320h 18.5 1.8 1.3 Per Week 92.5 9.0 6.5 Per Year 4,810 (80 hours) 468 (7.8 hours) 338 (5.63 hours)
600 360 180 90 60 45 30 15 0 HDD NAS P320h

Seconds

Figure 10: Average Initial Boot Time

50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0 HDD NAS P320h

Minutes

Figure 11: Complete Boot Time

100,000 50,000 10,000 1,000 100 10 0 HDD NAS P320h READ Latency WRITE Latency

Microseconds (s)

Figure 12: Latency Times

Storage Pool

Table 3: Productivity Summary

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