They performance guys over at VMware have announced some really impressive IOPS testing results. Using three CX3-80 storage arrays they were able to push over 100,000 IO Operations per second from a single 4-socket server running ESX 3.5. Additionally, they reported the latency numbers which look very good as well.

I find this very interesting because it is in line with results that Kong and I got in our Exchange 2007 on ESX testing we did last year. We found that you could size storage for Exchange VMs the same as you size storage for Exchange on physical servers (up to the 2000 users in a single VM that we tested). Exchange is I/O intensive and is sensitive to any increased latencies. So while we didn't test a workload of 100,000 IOPS, we did see good storage performance with an application that is very sensitive to these kinds of things.

The other thing that I like about this test is that it is cool. As evidence I point to the cool graphs they included and the 495 15K RPM disks that were used.

Todd