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

Choosing the SCSI controller for storage


In vSphere 5.1 there are four types of SCSI controller for a VM. Those are:

  • Bus Logic Parallel

  • LSI Logic Parallel

  • LSI Logic SAS

  • PVSCSI

In order to successfully boot a virtual machine, the guest operating system must support the type of SCSI HBA you choose for your virtual machine hardware.

Bus Logic is there for supporting your old Guest OS, an example is Microsoft Windows 2000 Server.

LSI Logic is there for supporting your newer guest operating system. There is not much difference in I/O performance between Bus Logic and LSI Logic, however there is a slight difference in the way the hardware represents itself inside the guest. VMware recommends picking up LSI Logic for your Linux Guests.

LSI Logic SAS has been built to support even newer guest operating system with advanced feature support, for example, clustering support in Windows 2008. As it is a specially built controller, it boosts the I/O performance slightly than your legacy controller. You need to...