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

Introduction


Ideally, a performance problem should be defined within the context of an ongoing performance management process. Performance management refers to the process of establishing performance requirements for applications, in the form of a service-level agreement (SLA), and then tracking and analyzing the achieved performance to ensure that those requirements are met. A complete performance management methodology includes collecting and maintaining baseline performance data for applications, systems, and subsystems, for example, storage and network.

In the context of performance management, a performance problem exists when an application fails to meet its predetermined SLA. Depending on the specific SLA, the failure might be in the form of excessively long response times or throughput below some defined threshold.

ESX/ESXi and virtual machine performance tuning is complicated because virtual machines share underlying physical resources, and in particular the CPU.

Finally, configuration issues or inadvertent user errors might lead to poor performance. For example, a user might use a symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) virtual machine when a single processor virtual machine would work well. You might also see a situation where a user sets shares but then forgets about resetting them, resulting in poor performance because of the changing characteristics of other virtual machines in the system.

If you overcommit any of these resources, you might see performance bottlenecks. For example, if too many virtual machines are CPU intensive, you might see slow performance because all of the virtual machines need to share the underlying physical CPU.