Migration to pvscsi from LSI for SQL Server on VMware; It *really* matters

I expect it to make a big difference.  Even so, I'm still pleasantly surprised how much of a difference it makes.

About the VM:
8 vcpu system.
19 logicaldisk/physicaldisks other than the C Windows install drive.
About the guests vdisks:
Each guest physicaldisk is its own datastore, each datastore is on a single ESXi host LUN.

On July 27th, the 19 SQL Server vdisks were distributed among 3 LSI vHBA (with 1 additional LSI vHBA reserved for the C install drive).

I finally caught back up with this system.  An LSI vHBA for the C install drive has been retained.  But the remaining 3 LSI vHBA have been switched out by pvscsi vHBA.

The nature of the workload is the same on both days, even though the amount of work done is different.  Its a concurrent ETL of many tables, with threads managed in a pool and the pool size is constant between the two days.

Quite a dramatic change at the system level :-)

Lets first look at read behavior before and after the change.  I start to cringe when read latency for this workload is over 150 ms.  100 ms I *might* be able to tolerate.  After changing to the pvscsi vHBA it looks very healthy at under 16 ms.

OK, what about write behavior?

Ouch!! The workload can tolerate up to 10ms average write latency for a bit.  5 ms is the performance target.  With several measures above 100 ms write latency on July 28th, the system is at risk of transaction log buffer waits, SQL Server free list stalls, and more painful than usual waits on tempdb.  But after the change to pvscsi, all averages are below 10 ms with the majority of time below 5 ms.  Whew!

Looking at queuing behavior is the most intriguing :-) Maximum device and adapter queue depth is one of the most significant differences between the pvscsi and LSI vHBA adapters. The pvscsi adapter allows increasing the maximum adapter queue depth from default 256 all the way to 1024 (by setting a Windows registry parameter for "ringpages"). Also allows increasing device queue depth from default 64 to 256 (although storport will pass no more than 254 at a time to the lower layer).  By contrast, LSI adapter and device queue depths are both lower and no increase is possible.

It may be counter-intuitive unless considering the nature of the measure (instantaneous) and the nature of what's being measured (outstanding disk IO operations at that instant).  But by using the vHBA with higher adapter and device queue depth (thus allowing higher queue length from the application side), the measured queue length was consistently lower.  A *lot* lower. :-)