Comparison of Storage Protocol Performance: ESX Server 3.5

This study provides performance comparisons of various storage connection options available to VMware® ESX Server. We used the widely used IOmeter benchmark for the comparison. The results show that all four network storage options can reach wire‐speed throughput when properly configured. The wire‐speed throughput is also maintained with multiple virtual machines driving concurrent I/Os, indicating that the limiting factor in performance scalability is not in ESX Server. The data also demonstrates that, although Fibre Channel has the best performance in throughput, latency, and CPU efficiency among the four options, iSCSI and NFS are also quite capable and may offer a better cost‐to‐performance ratio in certain deployment scenarios. This study covers the following topics: “Hardware and Software Environment” on page 1 “Performance Results” on page 3 “Conclusion” on page 6