Book Image

vSphere High Performance Cookbook

Book Image

vSphere High Performance Cookbook

Overview of this book

VMware vSphere is the key virtualization technology in today's market. vSphere is a complex tool and incorrect design and deployment can create performance-related problems. vSphere High Performance Cookbook is focused on solving those problems as well as providing best practices and performance-enhancing techniques. vSphere High Performance Cookbook offers a comprehensive understanding of the different components of vSphere and the interaction of these components with the physical layer which includes the CPU, memory, network, and storage. If you want to improve or troubleshoot vSphere performance then this book is for you! vSphere High Performance Cookbook will teach you how to tune and grow a VMware vSphere 5 infrastructure. This book focuses on tuning, optimizing, and scaling the infrastructure using the vSphere Client graphical user interface. This book will enable the reader with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to build and run a high-performing VMware vSphere virtual infrastructure. You will learn how to configure and manage ESXi CPU, memory, networking, and storage for sophisticated, enterprise-scale environments. You will also learn how to manage changes to the vSphere environment and optimize the performance of all vSphere components. This book also focuses on high value and often overlooked performance-related topics such as NUMA Aware CPU Scheduler, VMM Scheduler, Core Sharing, the Virtual Memory Reclamation technique, Checksum offloading, VM DirectPath I/O, queuing on storage array, command queuing, vCenter Server design, and virtual machine and application tuning. By the end of this book you will be able to identify, diagnose, and troubleshoot operational faults and critical performance issues in vSphere.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
vSphere High Performance Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

vNUMA (Virtual NUMA) considerations


Non Uniform Memory Access also known as NUMA is designed with memory locality in mind so that pools of adjacent memory are placed in islands called NUMA nodes. Each of today's CPUs has multiple cores but that does not always result in a NUMA node with a given number of cores and RAM. It is the Integrated Memory Controller who decides that. There are multi-core CPU's that are not NUMA aware (original XEON 7300/7400 CPU's, for example), however on a different note, in a Nehalem-EX systems if it has four sockets each with 8 cores for a total of 32 cores and 256GB of RAM total, it would mean that each socket had 64GB of RAM.

What if your VM needs to be bigger than a NUMA node? One of the great new features in vSphere 5 is vNUMA or the ability for NUMA to be presented inside the VM to the guest OS.

vNUMA is designed for modern OS's that are NUMA aware and can make intelligent page management decisions based on locality.

Legacy OS functions in a similar manner...