Performance Analysis in HyperFlex and vSAN Hyper Convergence Platforms for Online Course Consideration

Abstract

With the ubiquity of high-speed networks and cloud technologies, hyper-convergence (HC) has become commonplace and satisfies flex allocation requirements. This study compared the VMware virtual storage area network (vSAN), which has the largest market share, with Cisco HyperFlex, released by Cisco for high-level network applications, to assess the performance of various HC technologies in running virtual machines in most virtualized environments. The experiments consider the benchmark (HCIBench) to evaluate the platform’s performance. The benchmark provides objective performance scores. Thus, the performance results derived by HCIBench could be applied to discuss the appropriate scenarios for both VMware vSAN and Cisco HyperFlex. The experiments simulate common application scenarios to discover good HC platforms for real-world requirements. The VMware vSAN demonstrated more robust overall performance (about 38.18% and 22.72% improvement for IOPS and transmission speed, respectively), the HyperFlex Data Platform provided better performance wrote latency (about 20.32% improvement) when few virtual machines were used, and the write load was heavy. The difference in CPU usage between the two platforms is not too much (about 2.565%). The vSAN is recommended for general purposes, while HyperFlex performs better in areas with high write requirements (such as the data center).

Keywords

• Hyper-convergence
• HyperFlex
• performance analysis
• virtual storage area network