PVSCSI Storage Performance

VMware vSphere 4 offers Paravirtualized SCSI (PVSCSI), a new virtual storage adapter. This paper provides a performance comparison of PVSCSI and LSI Logic. The experiment results show that PVSCSI provides better throughput and lower CPU utilization in virtualized environments where guest applications are very I/O intensive. The experiment results also demonstrate that, although PVSCSI provides better CPU efficiency, LSI Logic is able to provide wire-speed throughput, indicating that the storage adapter is not the limiting factor in I/O performance if the system is properly configured.