Friday, February 14, 2020

Samsung 1TB QVO SSD had performance issues running Windows VMs in VMware ESXi 5.5

I wanted to add some pep to an old ESXi 5.5 system by installing an SSD.  I picked up a Samsung 1TB QVO SSD on a deal and was excited to get it installed.  After it was installed, I went through the process of moving VMs from the old drive to the SSD.  Booted up some Linux VMs and they seemed to run perfectly.  When I got to a Windows VM, the Windows system become unresponsive.  Looking at the performance of the VM in VSphere, the latency was extremely high.  I did not keep any screenshots of the highest peaks, but it was hitting in the hundreds of thousands.  Abysmal.



I tried researching the behavior but came up short.  I tried installing a fresh Windows VM thinking this one was corrupt, no improvement.  In the end, I purchased a Samsung 1TB EVO, cloned the QVO to the EVO, installed and ran the same Windows VM that was performing poorly on the QVO, and it ran perfectly.  Booted up a bunch of VMs to try and impact performance but it was 100x times better than the QVO.  I ended up throwing the QVO into a laptop (running Windows) and it runs perfectly.  I don't know if this was due to the QVO having issues with handling larger files or something else.

tl/dr; The Samsung QVO drive performed poorly (for Windows VMs) on ESXi 5.5 - Replaced with an EVO and no more issues.

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