Flash Hypervisor: The Savior to Storage I/O Bottlenecks?

The combination of hypervisors and server flash is an important but inconvenient marriage. Server flash has profound technology and programming implications on hypervisors. Conversely, various hypervisor functions make it challenging for server flash to be adopted in virtualized environments.

This talk will present specific hypervisor areas that are challenged by the physics of server flash, and possible solutions. We will discuss the motivation and use cases around a Flash Hypervisor to virtualize server flash and make it compatible with clustered hypervisor features, such as VM mobility, high availability and distributed VM scheduling. Finally, results will be presented from an example of a flash hypervisor (PernixData FVP), and its impact on data center storage design due to decoupling storage performance from capacity.

Learning Objectives

The role and potential of Flash in the virtualized data centers
Best practices for using Flash to accelerate storage performance