SIOC statistics

SIOC (Storage IO Control) is apparently a hot topic. There have been an important number of posts since it was made available with vSphere 4.1. On this blog, in my Automate SIOC post, you can find functions to verify and activate/deactivate SIOC from your PowerShell script.

A recent post on Yellow-Bricks, called Enable Storage IO Control on all Datastores! got quite a few comments and Tweets.

I was intrigued by one of the comments on Twitter that stated that the users didn’t understand what SIOC was all about. From several posts on SIOC I came to understand that the non-VI workload event would be fired when SIOC doesn’t see any latency improvements when it throttles the storage queue. Simple enough, but is there any data available that can make this visible ?

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Automate SIOC

With vSphere 4.1 came 150+ new features. One of these is called Storage IO Control or SIOC.And it has been a very popular subject in the last weeks. Just a small selection of blog posts on the subject:

The only thing missing was a way to automate everything surrounding SIOC. And so I decided to write a couple of functions to fill that gap.

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Create VMFS datastores on “free space” partitions

The New-Datastore cmdlet allows you to easily create VMFS datastores on a free LUN or local disk. But what if you want to create a VMFS datastore on that free partition you have left on a LUN or on a local disk ? These free GBs could come in handy and it’s a shame letting them go to waste. Unfortunately, the New-Datastore cmdlet doesn’t have an option (yet) to handle “free space” partitions.

Exactly such a question was raised by Alasdair in his thread new-datastore on ESX4i Installable local disk in the PowerCLI Community recently.

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