New performance whitepaper from VROOM blog. If you ever doubted any performance issues due to using Thin provisioned disks, you should read this whitepaper. In fact there are just very little performance loss (if any) when using thin disks. The benefit of using thin disks over thick disks is quite big as you can save tons of space on your SAN. Otherwise you would not manage to install as many VMs as you would like.
The results can be resumed in following:
- Both thin and thick disks perform similarly on various workloads.
- Thin provisioned disks show similar performance trends as thick disks do when scaled across different hosts.
- External fragmentation has negligible impact on the performance of thin provisioned disks.
- There is insignificant performance impact on existing thick disks if thin provisioning is implemented on a shared array.
You can get the whole whitepaper here.