Jetstress Performance Testing on Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) – Part 1 – The Baseline Test

The following is Part 1 of the Jetstress performance testing on Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) series of videos.

This video shows the following:

  1. Stopping/Starting the NDSF cluster to ensure a fair starting point (No artificial pre warming of cache etc)
  2. The Performance required for 2500 Exchange Users (100 messages / Day with 2 DAG copies) being 732 Jetstress IOPS as per MS Exchange Server role requirements calculator.
  3. The Performance achieved by Jetstress with 8 threads using 8 vDisks (4 for DB, 4 for Logs)

The reason the demonstration is limited to 2500 users is because the Virtual machine compute requirements already is over the maximum recommended RAM for an Exchange 2013/2016 Server (96GB). As such, no additional storage performance is required as compute is more often than not the constraining factor.

For more information see: Peak performance vs Real World – Exchange

Note: This demonstration is not showing the peak performance which can be achieved by Jetstress on Nutanix. In fact it’s running on a ~3 year old NX-3450 with Ivy Bridge processors and Jetstress is tuned (as the video shows) to a low thread count which still achieves >3x the required IOPS for 2500 Exchange users.

Part 1

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Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) Intelligent VM Load Balancing at Power On

I thought I would share a quick demonstration showing how Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) load balances VMs at power on to ensure optimal performance.

This is just one of the many seemingly simple functions of AHV to ensure optimal performance throughout the cluster. Its pretty simple, when AHV issues a Power On request it queries the Acropolis Master which continually receives compute (CPU/RAM) and Storage (Capacity/Performance) data from the Acropolis Slaves (other nodes) in the cluster.

When the Acropolis Master receives the power on request it simply looks for the node with the lowest utilization and issues the command to power on the VM.

This is a simple, proactive way of minimising the chance of compute contention within a cluster.

Related Articles:

  1. Why Nutanix Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) is the next generation hypervisor

Jetstress Performance Testing on Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) – Part 2 – Performance after a VM Migration

This is Part 2 of the Jetstress performance testing on Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) series of videos.

This video shows the following:

  1. Jetstress performance after the VM is migrated from the node the Databases were created, too another node in the NDSF cluster.

This test is the first of several to show the impact to performance by migrating VMs to nodes in the same cluster where not all data is stored locally. This is demonstrated by the advanced reporting capabilities of NDSF.

Note: As with previous videos, This demonstration is not showing the peak performance which can be achieved by Jetstress on Nutanix.

Part 2

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