Rough estimate for speed advantage of SAN-via-fibre to san-via-iSCSI when using VMware vSphere
- by Dirk Paessler
We are in the process of setting up two virtualization servers (DELL R710, Dual Quadcore Xeon CPUs at 2.3 Ghz, 48 GB RAM) for VMware VSphere with storage on a SAN (DELL Powervault MD3000i, 10x 500 GB SAS drives, RAID 5) which will be attached via iSCSI on a Gbit Ethernet Switch (DELL Powerconnect 5424, they call it "iSCSI-optimized").
Can anyone give an estimate how much faster a fiber channel based solution would be (or better "feel")? I don't mean the nominal speed advantage, I mean how much faster will virtual machines effectively work?
Are we talking twice the speed, five times, 10 times faster? Does it justify the price?
PS: We are not talking about heavily used database servers or exchange servers. Most of the virtualized servers run below 3-5% average CPU load.