Performance Implications of Storage I/O Control-Enabled SSD Datastores

The Storage I/O Control (SIOC) feature in VMware vSphere 6.5 is designed to differentiate performance between high priority virtual machines and low priority ones. Additionally, SIOC allows administrators to allocate absolute IOPS to virtual devices to meet performance requirements.

This paper shows the advantages of using Storage I/O Control to manage shared storage using SSD. A study shows that administrators can set the performance expectation of VMs in terms of IOPS using explicit numbers or proportional values in vSphere 6.5, and that high priority VMs achieve more IOPS compared to low priority VMs.