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

Designing a network for load balancing and failover for vSphere Distributed Switch


The load balancing and failover policies that are chosen for the infrastructure can have an impact on the overall design. Using NIC teaming, we can group several physical network switches attached to a vSwitch. This grouping enables load balancing between the different Physical NICs, and provides fault tolerance if a card failure occurs.

The vSphere distributed vSwitch offers a load balancing option that actually takes the network workload into account when choosing the physical uplink. This is route based on a physical NIC load. This is also called Load Based Teaming (LBT). We recommend this load balancing option over the others when using a distributed vSwitch. Benefits of using this load balancing policy are as follows:

  • It is the only load balancing option that actually considers NIC load when choosing uplinks.

  • It does not require upstream switch configuration dependencies like the route based on IP hash algorithm...