what is acceptable datastore latency on VMware ESXi host?

Looking at our performance figures on our existing VMware ESXi 4.1 host at the Datastore/Real-time performance data

• Write Latency
  • Avg 14 ms
  • Max 41 ms
• Read Latency
  • Avg 4.5 ms
  • Max 12 ms

People don't seem to be complaining too much about it being slow with those numbers. But how much higher could they get before people found it to be a problem?

We are reviewing our head office systems due to running low on storage space, and are tossing up between buying a 2nd VM host with DAS or buying some sort of NAS for SMB file shares in the near term and maybe running VMs from it in the longer term.

Currently we have just under 40 staff at head office with 9 smaller branches spread across the country. Head office is runnning in an MS RDS session based environment with linux ERP and mail systems. In total 22 VMs on a single host with DAS made from a RAID 10 made of 6x 15k SAS disks.

Definitely agree with both answers already provided here.

If head office is running on a single host you should probably get a second one regardless of storage latency - phoebus Nov 1 '13 at 12:17

My understanding is that average latency for a VMFS datastore should be 20ms or less, so I don't see a problem here. – joeqwerty Nov 1 '13 at 15:12

I would dig deeper just to get an understanding of where the latency is coming from so you have an overall big picture of where you could improve on any potential latency issues.

The values you listed are not all that bad and especially if no one is complaining. Are you currently using DAS or NAS storage? Also have you noticed any specific VM that could be causing any Latency issues?

You can dig deeper using ESXTOP from the CLI and get an idea of your DAVG, QAVG, KAVG and GAVG metrics:

The VMWare blog has a good explanation of these.