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

Identifying when memory is the problem


Both your host memory and VM memory can indicate that it is under pressure. But the main challenge to a VMware admin is how to determine that there is a memory performance issue.

There are a few things which a VMware admin should understand is that there could be a memory performance issue and those are:

  • Your host memory consumption is approaching your total host memory

  • Active memory in your host is approaching your total memory

  • Ballooning is occurring

  • Host swapping is occurring

Now, if you wonder what is Active memory here in relation to Consumed memory, let me tell you that Active Memory is the amount of memory that is actively used, as estimated by VMkernel based on recently touched memory pages. For a VM this is referred to the amount of guest "physical" memory actively used.

An ESXi host calculates Active memory by using the sum of all active metrics for all powered-on virtual machines plus vSphere services on the host.

There could be another side to it...