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You are here: Home / Automation / Configuring per-VMDK IOPS reservations in vSphere 6.0

Configuring per-VMDK IOPS reservations in vSphere 6.0

05.20.2015 by William Lam // 1 Comment

One of the new features in vSphere 6.0 that was quickly mentioned at the end of Duncan Epping's What's New Storage DRS blog post is the ability to configure an IOPS reservation on a per-VMDK basis which is now integrated with both Storage IO Control (SIOC) and Storage DRS. As Duncan mentioned at the end of his article, this feature is only consumable through the vSphere API and given that, it may not be a feature that is widely known or used. This topic had recently surfaced in an internal thread on how to set the IOPS reservations and below are the details if you wish to leverage this new vSphere 6.0 storage platform capability.

To be able to use this new feature, there are two requirements:

  1. You need to set the IOPS reservation value on an individual VMDK which is under the StorageIOAllocationInfo property of a VMDK called, not surprisingly, reservation.
  2. All ESXi hosts mounting the Datastore must be running vSphere 6.0

To be clear, this reservation property has been around since vSphere 5.5, but had only had support for local datastores. In vSphere 6.0, shared datastores are now supported along with both SIOC and Storage DRS being aware.

To exercise the use of this vSphere API, I have created a simple PowerCLI script called configurePerVMDKIOPS.ps1 (works with both vSphere 5.x & 6.0) which you will need to edit to include your vCenter Server, the name of the VM you wish to set the IOPS reservation along with the VMDK label and IOPS value.

Here is an example output for configuring a VM named Photon with IOPS reservations of 2000 on Hard Disk 1:

configure-per-vmdk-iops-reservations
I have been told that in the future, the plan is to make this configurable available in the vSphere Web Client. Though, honestly why would anyone want to perform this change across multiple VMs by hand, when you can quickly and efficiently automate this across your environment with a simple script? 😉

More from my site

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  • New vSphere 6.0 API for configuring SMP-FT
  • Using latest PowerActions 1.5.0 to issue VMFS UNMAP API in vSphere 6.0 Web Client

Categories // Automation, vSphere 6.0 Tags // iops reservation, PowerCLI, sioc, storage drs, storage io control, StorageIOAllocationInfo, vSphere 6.0, vSphere API

Comments

  1. *protectedP. Cruiser says

    07/02/2015 at 6:40 pm

    I'm seeing more and more vendors providing IOPS requirements for the virtual editions of their products, so I'm definitely looking forward to this showing up in the web client.

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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