Two weeks ago, Nutanix released its new AoS version 5.11. This release has many new features. The introduction of these features is definitely worth looking into. During this post, I will explain the Nutanix Storage QoS feature. Within the next weeks, I hope to find some time to look into more new features.
Storage QoS explanation
Nutanix Storage QoS allows Prism Central Administrators to control the performance of storage on the virtual machine level. This guarantees consistent performance on the entire workload and even multiple workloads within a single cluster.
Storage QoS configuration
From the Prism Central UI, navigate to any target virtual machine and choose update. A new option is available: Set QoS Attributes
Note: Setting Max IOPS limit on a virtual machine (VM) can affect latency for that VM. This in its turn may result in higher latency being displayed in the cluster latency charts. Performance of other VMs is not affected in any way by this setting.
I understand that working with QoS attributes might result in incorrect cluster-wide performance charts. This is because we might deliberately increase the latency of a virtual machine. Therefore, this feature should only be used for specific bully VMs.
Modifying a Storage QoS can be done based on one of two metrics, IOPS or Throughput. If any of both metrics limits are known, you can modify the value, otherwise, a tip can be to look to the history metrics of the VM to determine an average of one of both values.
QoS range: The minimal IOPS value is 100 and the maximum configurable value possible is 10e15, the maximum value is obviously a configuration value and has not been tested.
Indicative details based on the block size can be consulted before submitting the attribute click on show details for more info in the wizard.
Once you submit the change, the Nutanix Storage QoS is processed and activated.
This great feature allows you to successfully limit VMs based on their storage share.
I think using this sQoS feature based on VM tags would greatly increase its usage. For example, If you have a Test Environment and tag VMs, we can limit the IOPS of all Test VMs to 10K IOPS, this avoids impacting Production environments when executing test scenarios.
Addendum
- I noticed an error during testing: “Error processing your request”, solution: validate if you have updated PE and AHV to 5.11.
- When you are upgrading from a previous version, You must Upgrade PC, Upgrade PE and Upgrade AHV to enable to Storage QoS feature.