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 the host for a highly available and high-performing storage


VMware ESXi enables multiple hosts to share the same physical storage through its optimized storage stack and VMware VMFS distributed filesystem. Centralized storage of virtual machines can be accomplished by using VMFS and/or NFS. Centralized storage enables virtualization capabilities such as VMware vMotion, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), and VMware High Availability.

Several factors have an effect on storage performance:

  • Storage protocols

  • Proper configuration of your host device and storage devices

  • Load balancing across available storage processors

  • Storage queues

Getting ready

To step through this recipe, you will need one or more running ESXi Servers, HBA Card, an NIC Card, and a FC or iSCSI Storage. No other prerequisites are required.

How to do it...

High availability requires at least two HBA connections to provide redundant paths to the SAN or storage system.

Follow the proceeding steps to design a high performing...