Under the supervision of VMware vCenter Server, ESX 4 thin provisioning is safe and reliable even for production workloads thanks to advanced storage accounting and built-in monitoring.  And even if the worst does happen — an unexpectedly full datastore — recovery is simple.

Now that you are convinced that VMware vSphere thin provisioning has a place in your data center, you may be wondering about performance tradeoffs.

It turns out that thin disks perform just about as well as thick disks.

New Performance Results

In this brand-new VMware vStorage Thin Provisioning performance study, VMware performance engineers compare thick and thin disk performance.  This must-read document covers several important topics, such as:

• I/O-intensive benchmarking with a 16-node ESX cluster
• File copy benchmarking with 2 ESX hosts
• Fragmentation impact
• Thin provisioning affect on co-located thick disks

Now, go forth and provision… thinly.

Related posts:

1. Finding thin-provisioned virtual disks with PowerShell
2. Responsible Thin Provisioning in VMware vSphere
3. Easy recovery from a full VMware ESX datastore
4. The Truth About Storage Hot Add and Remove

The VMware Performance Team has repeatedly demonstrated how vSphere is the superior platform for your production workloads.  Check out the latest article on the VROOM! blog for all the details.

By running substantially more virtual machines per hypervisor host, VMware provides the lowest cost per application — even less expensive than so-called “free” virtualization solutions.

You might be tempted to compare this tremendous success with first-generation offerings from other virtualization vendors, such as Citrix WLB or SCVMM PRO Tips.  Coincidentally, both of those other solutions are not integrated –the resource balancing is performed by an external system that is monitoring virtual machine performance.  DRS is part of VMware vCenter and purpose-built for the virtual environment.

Note: the version of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 that supports live migration is not slated to be available until late December 2009.  That means Microsoft virtualization environments cannot yet even attempt to accomplish what VMware does today.  And by today, I mean June 2006.

Meet the Engineer

In this video you can hear one of the main engineers behind VMware DRS:

Related posts:

1. PRO Tips: pros only, please
2. Say it ain’t so, PRO!
3. Don’t know much about resource pools
4. Two thousand?