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First Published On: 04-26-2019
Last Updated On: 05-02-2019
Table Of Contents
1. Executive Summary
1.1.Business Case
1.2.Solution Overview
1.3.Key Results
2. Introduction
2.1.Purpose
2.2.Scope
2.3.Audience
3. Technology Overview
3.1.VMware vSphere 6.5
3.2.VMware vSAN 6.6
3.3.NSX for vSphere (NSX-v) 6.3.4
4. Solution Configuration
4.1.Architecture
4.2.Hardware Resources
4.3.Software Resources
5. Solution Validation
5.1.Test Overview
5.2.Test Considerations
5.3.Test Scenario
5.4.Test Procedures
5.5.Ten Parallel Scanner Streams inbound with RAID 5 Erasure Coding
5.6.Parallel Scanner Screams inbound and 13 Parallel Reads outbound with RAID 5
Erasure Coding
5.7.Ten Parallel Scanner Screams inbound and 13 Parallel Reads outbound with RAID 1
(FTT=1)
5.8.Graphical Test Result Comparison
6. Recommendations
6.1.VM vCPU Demand
6.2.Application Design
6.3.Conclusion
7. Reference
7.1.White Paper
7.2.Product Documentation
8. About the Author and Contributors
8.1.About the Author and Contributors
1. Executive Summary
This section covers the business case, solution overview, and key results.
The IntelliSite Image Management System (IMS) integrates with existing image analysis software, and are
developing connections to Labortory Information Systems (LIS) and various Hospital Information Systems.
Philips IMS is part of Philips IntelliSite Pathology Solution, which is an automated digital pathology image
creation, management, and review system comprising of an ultra-fast scanner, an image management system
and display including advanced features to mange the scanning, storage, presentation, and sharing of
information.
VMware vSAN uses industry-standard servers to create a low-cost and high-performance HCI solution. This
enables hospital IT departments already familiar with VMware vSphere to natively adopt vSAN for their
mission critical workloads such as picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), electronic health
records (EHRs), clinical, or auxiliary applications. VMware NSX®, leader in network virtualization allows the
highest security level on per VM perspective on a per policy base. Security and simplified manageability
allows fast integration and easy maintenance.
VMware and Philips have worked together to validate a solution, powered by VMware vSAN, to provide a
storage platform for healthcare digital imaging and indexing, which satisfies the performance, scalability, and
failure protection requirements needed for an economical yet powerful eco-system.
• Provides the solution architecture for hosting healthcare related datasets in a vSAN cluster.
• Validates predictable performance and scalability with vSAN.
• Demonstrates the impact of changing parameters to achieve the optimal performance.
• Identifies the steps required to ensure resiliency and availability against various failures.
• Provides best practices and general guidance.
2. Introduction
This section provides the purpose, scope, and audience of this document.
2.1 Purpose
This reference architecture showcases a solution for running healthcare-related image storage, cataloging,
and retrieval.
2.2 Scope
The reference architecture covers the following scenarios:
• Survey of IO profile, including read and write block size and randomness
• Network throughput and required configuration
• vSAN performance and scalability validation
• Configuration optimizations
• Resiliency against hardware failures
2.3 Audience
This reference architecture is targeted for system architects, designers, and administrators for a vSAN-based
system in the context of healthcare image storage, cataloging, and retrieval.
3. Technology Overview
This section provides an overview of the technologies used in this reference architecture:
• VMware vSphere 6.5
• VMware vSAN 6.6
• NSX-V 6.3.4
With vSphere 6.5, customers can run, manage, connect, and secure their applications in a common operating
environment, across clouds and devices.
4. Solution Configuration
This section introduces the resources and configurations for the solution including an architecture
diagram, hardware and software resources and other relevant configurations.
4.1 Architecture
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Server
• 4x HP DL380 G10 series
• Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6150 CPU @ 2.70GHz, total amount of RAM: 256 GB, disabled Intel Hyper-
threading
Network
NIC Driver Name VID:DID SVID:SDID Driver Version Firmware
Version (HCL link)
--------- -------------- -------------- -------------- --------------
-------------------
vmnic5 nmlx5 core 15b3:1015 1590:00d3 4.16.12.12 14.21.2800
vmnic6 nmlx5 core 15b3:1015 1590:00d4 4.16.12.12 14.21.2800
vmnic7 nmlx5 core 15b3:1015 1590:00d4 4.16.12.12 14.21.2800
vmnic9 nmlx5 core 15b3:1015 1590:00d4 4.16.12.12 14.21.2800
All vmnic uplinks are utilized and spread over two Distributed Virtual Switches (see Figure 3). DVS-1 has
2xvmnics (vmnic 5 and 6) in an active-active configuration, with VM, Management, NSX-V and data lake
synchronization traffic. DVS-2 has 2xvmnics (vmnic 7 and 9) configured using LACP for vSAN traffic.
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Storage
1x vSAN diskgroup per host setup with 1x NVMe (MO0800KEFHP) and 2x SSD (MO003840JWFWV) on HPE
P408i-a (see Figure 4).
4.3 Software Resources
Table 1. Software Resources
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5. Solution Validation
In this section, we present the test methodologies and results used to validate this solution.
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Highly co-current inbound data streams require a high-performance caching tier to sustain the high throughput
writes.
The application reaches block sizes of 550KB on writes and 128KB on reads.
Note: Large block sizes, together with FTT demands, require high-throughput network endpoints. Increasing
FTT or RAID level implies more write acknowledgments across hosts, which lowers the maximum achievable
storage performance.
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Figure 7. Test Results of 10 Parallel Scanner Streams inbound with RAID 5 Erasure Coding
The test results showed, on 10 parallel incoming streams, the same number of vCores were utilized. Stream
data was inbound but due to the application, data would be modified after the write, which introduced reads.
IO random level was around 8%, which indicated a very synchronous IO write flow.
On the reads vs. writes from all IOs, the randomness level did not go lower than 30%. High IO block-size
equates to high backend utilization, which means that the VM was limited by the vmnic throughput that
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translates into a VM latency of around 59ms. The lower VM reads and read block-size indicated data
manipulation in the application.
Figure 7. Test Results of Parallel Scanner Screams inbound and 13 Parallel Reads outbound with
RAID 5 Erasure Coding
The additional 13 parallel reading streams resulted in even higher latency due to the overutilization of the
available cores on the CPU.
The read percentage was slightly higher due to the increase in outstanding IO caused by the overloaded cores
(as each queue exhibits first-in-first-out behavior).
Note: RAID 5 relies heavily on the CPU; time to execute is impacted as ESXi needs additional cycles for the
read-modify-write operation.
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Figure 8. Test Results of 10 Parallel Scanner Screams inbound and 13 Parallel Reads outbound with
RAID 1 (FTT=1)
The application utilized 16+ vCPU cores by using RAID 1. In-Guest write IO latency dropped from around
200ms down to around 54ms, which allowed higher throughput and reduced the OIO value more than 50%.
This test demonstrated that changing the FTT method (from RAID 5 to RAID 1) could reduce the overhead on
the ESXi physical core to achieve better application and IO throughput.
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6. Recommendations
This section provides the recommended best practices for this solution.
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6.3 Conclusion
In today’s healthcare IT infrastructure ecosystem, understanding a VM and application workload in conjunction
with best practice VM sizing is critical to achieving operational excellence. vSAN offers a robust and
performant storage solution for the Philips IntelliSite Pathology solution. vSAN demonstrates high-
performance with low-latency for large block IO while maintaining low CPU demands for vSAN itself.
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7. Reference
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• Philips TissueMark
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• Dharmesh Bhatt, Senior Solutions Architect, Storage and Availability, Product Enablement, VMware
• Christian Rauber, Senior Solutions Architect, Storage and Availability, Product Enablement, VMware
• Aart Kenens, System Engineer, Digital Pathology Solutions, Philips
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