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

Trade-off factors while designing scale up and scale out clusters


You should take an initial design decision when you design your vSphere HA cluster. Now the decision is whether you should design a small cluster with larger hosts, or a large cluster with smaller hosts.

We call the first cluster as scale up cluster, and the second one as scale out cluster. There are many factors that work as a catalyst when you choose a scale up or a scale out cluster. Some of them are as follows:

  • Depending on the cost, which hardware is ideal for lowering cost, a few larger hosts or a large number of smaller hosts? Though this answer varies in different situations.

  • What is the operational cost and complexity over the period of time in maintaining any of these two models?

  • What about the other infrastructure components, such as power, cooling, and floor space?

  • What is the purpose of this cluster? Is it a Desktop Virtualization Cluster or a Server Virtualization Cluster?

The design decision that you choose depends...