Performance analysis of an iSCSI block device in virtualized environment

Virtualization is new to telecom but it has been already implemented in IT sectors. Thus its benefits are already proven, which drags other sectors attention towards it. Now the telecom organizations are also focusing on virtualization to reap the full benefits of it. The main focus of this thesis is to conduct a performance analysis of a block storage device in a virtualization environment. Storage performance plays vital role in telecom sector. The performance and the reliability of the storage device is more important factor to fulfill the client request with minimum latency. This thesis is comprised of three main areas. The first literature part is to study the different storage networking possibilities and the different storage protocol practice to establish communication between server and the storage in the storage area network. The study indicated that Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) has more advantages than other practices in the storage area network. The second part covers the design of storage area network (SAN) solution. The storage is offered by an iSCSI storage server. It offers a block level storage device access to the compute server. Different iSCSI targets are available in market, performance of those were compared. Linux-IO Target was concluded as better iSCSI target with better performance and reliability. The Storage server was implemented as a virtual machine for better resource utilization, thus there was a study about the hypervisor and the different networking options for the virtual machines were compared. The final part is to optimize the SAN solution. Multipathing, different caching options and different driver options provided by the kernel virtual machine (KVM)/ Quick emulators (QEMU) were considered for optimization