Storage I/O Control (SIOC) was introduced in vSphere 4.1 and allows for cluster wide control of disk resources. The primary aim is to prevent a single VM on a single ESX host from hogging all the I/O bandwidth to a shared datastore. An example could be a low priority VM which runs a data mining type application impacting the performance of other more important business VMs sharing the same datastore.
Configuring Storage I/O Control
Let's have a brief overview of how to configure SIOC. SIOC is enabled very simply via the properties of the datastore. This is a datastore built on a LUN from an EMC VNX 5500:
The Advanced button allows you to modify the latency threshold figure. SIOC doesn't do anything until this threshold is exceeded. By default in vSphere 5.0, the latency threshold is 30ms, but this can be changed if you want to have a lower of higher latency threshold value:
Through SIOC, Virtual Machines can now be assigned a priority when contention arises on a particular datastore. Priority of Virtual Machines is established using the concept of Shares. The more shares a VM has, the more bandwidth it gets to a datastore when contention arises. Although we had a disk shares mechanism in the past, it was only respected by VMs on the same ESX host so wasn't much use on shared storage which was accessed by multipe ESX hosts. Storage I/O Control enables the honoring of share values across all ESX hosts accessing the same datastore.
The shares mechanism is triggered when the latency to a particular datastore rises above the pre-defined latency threshold seen earlier. Note that the latency is calculated cluster-wide. Storage I/O Control also allows one to tune & place a maximum on the number of IOPS that a particular VM can generate to a shared datastore. The Shares and IOPS values are configured on a per VM basis. Edit the Settings of the VM, select the Resource tab, and the Disk setting will allow you to set the Shares value for when contention arises (set to Normal/1000 by default), and limit the IOPs that the VM can generate on the datastore (set to Unlimited by default):
More information on Storage I/O Control can be found in this whitepaper.
