In this talk, we will present actual performance results of the ESX Server storage subsystem with an emphasis on scalability in distributed environments. The scalability results collected on a 64-host blade cluster with shared storage will be covered for multiple use cases:

• Scalable consistency management - Covers performance results of metadata management with advanced distributed locking.
• Desktop workload performance - Covers performance of VMFS snapshots which enable Scalable Image management, also covering desktop scenarios.

• Distributed storage performance for IO intensive workloads - Covers performance results of various IO block sizes and access patterns with an aim to understand the steady-state scalability, responsiveness and fairness of ESX Server storage.