The effect of SSD on Virtual Machine performance. Well, today, we have something unusual compared to our previous SysAdmin classes. it is because we now use SSD in our hypervisor. During the training, the hypervisor is used to host virtual machines according to the scenarios. sometimes we need to install more than 10VMs at the same time which takes ages in the previous storage. In this test, we install solaris OS on proxmox hypervisor.
For your information, Installing Solaris 10 on proxmox hypervisor, is a little bit tricky as you need to carefully select hardware for the Operating System. Wrong selection of hardware, can lead to incompatibility and result to kernel panic :-(. Therefore, some of the hardware doesnt support hardware-assisted virtualisation (intel-vt / AMD-V) which result to slower performance. we are also unable to use hardware with optimised driver like virtIO disk / network, simply because the OS doesnt support it.
in our previous test, we installed a solaris 10 (update8) operating system on traditional storage (rotating metal disk) and it took around 2 hours to finish the installation.
therefor, we are wondering, how is the effect of SSD on Virtual Machine performance?
Our hypervisor is proxmox 4.5, with 10 core intel CPU, 16GB RAM, and the best of all is SSD 250GB.
In this test, we’re installing 8 VMs of Solaris 10 (update8) simultaneously. Below are the pictures of how the resources are used and how long does it takes to complete the whole 8 installation.
As it can be seen above, one significant advantage of using SSD storage is faster installation time, from 2 hours (per VMs) down to around 45 minutes (all 8VMs), which is a huge improvement.
well, based on the report above, i strongly recommend to use SSD storage for high load servers, because it really improves performance.
thank your reading The effect of SSD on Virtual Machine performance 🙂