I was fortunate to get my hands on a couple of FusionIO cards and put them into my lab.  If you have never heard of FusionIO, they are Flash storage married to a PCIe card.  You can see the size comparison to the EMC NS-120 disk array that is in the lab.

FusionIO claims that their cards can do 100,000 IOPS.  Of course on their website they say that they achieve 100,000 IOPS using 512b IO segments.  I wasn’t sure how useful this would be in the real world, but I used this as a starting point of comparison to my EMC NS-120.  I decided I would leverage my VMware View 4.5 environment in these tests.

I created a VM that would run IOmeter as a service on boot and connect to a master IOmeter VM.  I then used VMware View to scale to 50 worker VMs.  All of the worker VMs are running on two Cisco UCS B200 M1 blades with 2 Quad Core Xeons and 48GB of RAM.  The FusionIO cards are in a Cisco UCS C-210 rack mount server with 2 Six Core Xeons and 48GB of RAM.

As you can see in the results below, writing directly to the FusionIO card with 512b segments yielded ~90,000 IOPS.

Let’s compare that to a LUN of 5 200GB FC EFDs on the EMC NS-120 connected to UCS blades via Fibre Channel.  Hmm… about ~30,000 IOPS.

Seeing these results made my eyes brighten as I thought about all of the potential they would have if I could use them for storage in a View 4.5 environment.