VMware Virtual SAN Snapshots in VMware vSphere 6.0 Performance Study

In VMware vSphere 6.0, snapshots with VMware Virtual SAN have been completely redesigned. In this paper, VMware presents the performance of Virtual SAN snapshots for two different applications, namely a source tree compilation workload to roughly mimic “test and development” scenarios, and an online transaction-based database application.

Overall, VMware has found that Virtual SAN snapshots in vSphere 6.0 perform reasonably with minimal performance degradation compared to base disk performance. We also address performance tunable configurations and sizing recommendations to optimize performance with Virtual SAN snapshots.