This is just a short blog post to direct readers to a fantastic mixed-workload and heterogeneous database consolidation Proof of Concept. This VCE paper should not be missed. I assert that the VCE converged infrastructure platforms most notably the Vblock 540 are the best off-the-shelf solution for provisioning XtremIO storage array all-flash storage to large numbers of hosts each processing vastly differing workloads (production,test/dev,OLTP,OLAP).
This paper is full of useful information. It explains the XtremIO 24:1 data reduction realized in the test. It also shows a great deal of configuration tips such as controlling I/O on linux hosts with CGROUPS and on VMware virtual hosts via VMware Storage I/O Control.
The following is an overview of the testing landscape proven in the paper:
A high frequency online transaction processing (OLTP) application with Oracle using the Silly Little Oracle Benchmark (SLOB) tool A modern OLTP benchmark simulating a stock trading application representing a second OLTP workload for SQL Server ERP hosted on SAP with an Oracle data store simulating a sell-from-stock business scenario A decision support system (DSS) workload accessing an Oracle database An online analytical processing (OLAP) workload accessing two SQL Server analysis and reporting databases Ten development/test database copies for each of the Oracle and SQL Server OLTP and five development/test copies of the SAP/Oracle system (25 total copies)The following graphic helps visualize the landscape:
The following graphic shows an example of one of the test scenario I/O performance metrics discussed in the paper:
I encourage you to click the following link to download the paper: VCE Solutions for Enterprise Mixed Workloads on Vblock System 540