I thought I would share with you the real world performance of Microsoft Storage Spaces 2016. As a reminder my setup for this test is 1x NVME SSD acting as Cache. 2x Samsung 850 Evo drives in a mirror tier, 3x WD Red drives + 3x WD RE3 Drives in a Parity Space. The volume is comprised of 200GB of SSD space, 5.4TB of HDD space, and 30GB of Write Cache.
I ran this test twice. Once directly on the hypervisor, and once in the guest VM. The guest VM is using a dynamically expanding VHDX disk. Prior to running the test I ran the command
Optimize-Volume -Volume E -TierOptimize
To ensure that the disk was in a good state. I did not pin the IOMeter test file to the HDD or SSD tier. The test was run using the 512 75% read preset and the 4k 75% read preset set to run for 3 minutes against a 100GB test file. Here are the results.
SERVER TYPE: Storage Spaces Host
CPU TYPE / NUMBER: i7 920
HOST TYPE: Server 2016
STORAGE TYPE / DISK NUMBER / RAID LEVEL: SSD + HDD Tiered Parity
| Test name |
Latency |
Avg iops |
Avg MBps |
cpu load |
| 512 B; 75% Read; 0% random |
0.04 |
23643 |
11 |
15% |
| 4 KiB; 75% Read; 0% random |
0.23 |
4314 |
16 |
10% |
SERVER TYPE: Windows Hyper-V Guest
CPU TYPE / NUMBER: i7 920 (4 virtual cores)
HOST TYPE: Server 2012 R2 Virtual
STORAGE TYPE / DISK NUMBER / RAID LEVEL: SSD + HDD Tiered Parity
| Test name |
Latency |
Avg iops |
Avg MBps |
cpu load |
| 512 B; 75% Read; 0% random |
0.12 |
8071 |
3 |
0% |
| 4 KiB; 75% Read; 0% random |
1.22 |
816 |
3 |
0% |
As you can see the performance difference between host and VM is pretty apparent. This performance is perfectly fine for the Plex file server that I run off this system, however if I was running something that was more IO heavy like SQL this performance wouldn’t be good enough and I would need to probably look at doing a Mirrored space.
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I thought I would share with you the real world performance of Microsoft Storage Spaces 2016. As a reminder my setup for this test is 1x NVME SSD acting as Cache. 2x Samsung 850 Evo drives in a mirror tier, 3x WD Red drives + 3x WD RE3 Drives in a Parity Space. The volume is comprised of 200GB of SSD space, 5.4TB of HDD space, and 30GB of Write Cache.
I ran this test twice. Once directly on the hypervisor, and once in the guest VM. The guest VM is using a dynamically expanding VHDX disk. Prior to running the test I ran the command
To ensure that the disk was in a good state. I did not pin the IOMeter test file to the HDD or SSD tier. The test was run using the 512 75% read preset and the 4k 75% read preset set to run for 3 minutes against a 100GB test file. Here are the results.
As you can see the performance difference between host and VM is pretty apparent. This performance is perfectly fine for the Plex file server that I run off this system, however if I was running something that was more IO heavy like SQL this performance wouldn’t be good enough and I would need to probably look at doing a Mirrored space.
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