How much does CPU help storage performance?

rrbnc · Thu Dec 04, 2014 5:03 am

I know with SAN solutions where they are doing something like LSFS, they say that boosting CPU speed and cores will give you more storage performance. Is that the case with StarWind also? I am wondering if I can stick with relatively low CPU performance (ex. 4-core 2.4 GHz for a storage-only node), or does it improve performance if I spend a lot more for CPUs with more speed and cores? I know the docs said to prefer more cores over more GHz, but there is a big price difference between a single 4-core Xeon and dual 18-core Xeons.

AndyKnight · Thu Dec 04, 2014 5:45 pm

Admittedly I use Starwind for my home lab of 2 vSphere 5.5 hosts with ~25 VM's of mixed workloads (not very large by most standards) but I rarely see the CPU doing much (Core i7 930 2.8Ghz from about 2-3 years ago). I was tracking some large data copies, storage vMotions etc and the CPU wasn't taxed. My environment is mixed between image and LSFS at the moment so there might be more of a difference if it were all LSFS. Maybe when the beta v8 with the LSFS fix in it goes to GA I'll do some more testing.

Andy

Fri Dec 05, 2014 4:56 pm

CPU typically is not an issue. For a heavy RAM-based and many-K-IOPS setups it is but you'll see it with your Performance Monitor and Task Mgr run @ host.

Yes, more cores are preferred as these setups are more "elastic".

rrbnc wrote:I know with SAN solutions where they are doing something like LSFS, they say that boosting CPU speed and cores will give you more storage performance. Is that the case with StarWind also? I am wondering if I can stick with relatively low CPU performance (ex. 4-core 2.4 GHz for a storage-only node), or does it improve performance if I spend a lot more for CPUs with more speed and cores? I know the docs said to prefer more cores over more GHz, but there is a big price difference between a single 4-core Xeon and dual 18-core Xeons.