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Integration of the PowerStore container-based architecture with integrated VMware ESXi results in a new level of consolidation for enterprise storage. This integration combines the benefits of a local on-array application environment with unmatched integration with the vSphere management environment and server resources. This ability allows users to bring applications closer to storage, by running applications as virtual machines directly on PowerStore.
Benefits of the AppsON capability include a new level of agility for application deployments, with seamless movement between the PowerStore appliances and VMware ESXi servers. AppsON also provides the ability to shrink the stack by eliminating server and networking footprint for space-efficient edge and remote deployments. AppsON is ideal for data-intensive applications that require low latency or a storage-heavy imbalance of compute and storage.
AppsON can be an attractive option whether the goal is to optimize I/O performance by reducing components in the data path, add performance to an existing vSphere cluster, offload a noisy neighbor, or other reasons.
For PowerStore X model appliances, the PowerStore X Performance Best Practice Tuning paper provides several tips that increase performance for SQL Server workloads. These tips are especially helpful if you are running workloads that use block sizes greater than 128k such as analytic workloads and backup/restore operations. Besides the recommendations in this paper, when running workloads larger than 128k, you can find other performance gains by increasing the iSCSI maximum I/O size, which is 128k by default. To enable this result, run the following command on each host:
esxcli system settings advanced set -o /ISCSI/MaxIoSizeKB -i 512
Instructions for running esxcli commands on PowerStore X nodes are in the PowerStore X Performance Best Practice Tuning paper.