PernixData virtualizes server-side flash and server RAM across all hypervisor nodes in a compute cluster and hooks the high-speed server-side resources into existing VM I/O paths to transparently reduce the IOPS burden on an existing storage system. Customers leverage PernixData’s FVP with their existing primary storage deployments and manage them within the context of their familiar hypervisor management tools
In a nutshell it’s awesome and if Veeam hadn’t recently patented a certain phrase, I would associate that particular phrase with FVP.
New features in the FVP 2.5:
- Distributed Fault Tolerant Memory-Z which compresses data stored in RAM.
- Intelligent I/O profiling, which provides a way for administrators to temporarily suspend and resume acceleration on virtual machines, and without deleting the flash footprint for those VMs.
- Role-based access control
- Network acceleration for NFS datastores.
For me the standout being Memory compression which opens the door for more efficient use of FVP to use precious/expensive RAM resources as acceleration cache. Check out Frank Denneman’s blog here where he goes through the feature in detail. Some of the numbers accosiated with FVP RAM acceleration are just silly, so the ability to compress and be smart with the data used in memory makes it more attractive to add a little more RAM to those Host Build sheets.
The I/O Profiling is manual at the moment, but is a good start for those who know VM workloads that could potentially inject “dirty” blocks into the FVP cache during backup or Virus Scanning operations…I’d like to see this become even more intelligent at become self aware of data that’s dirty…this would be a big help for Service Providers.
In terms of Bug Fixes, there is a fix for those using Using Veeam to restore a VM to a different datastore on the same host which had resulted in the VM remaining in a stalled state.
Thanks for PernixData who made me a PernixPro last week…I love the technology and it’s certainly done wonders within our ESXi platforms to help solve issue with higher than wanted storage latency. If you have spare SSD or want to check out the RAM cache features of FVP, head to the site and download a full 30 day trial…easy to install and low impact in terms of configuring FVP against datastores or VMs.
