Book Image

VMware Performance and Capacity Management, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Sunny Dua
Book Image

VMware Performance and Capacity Management, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Sunny Dua

Overview of this book

Performance management and capacity management are the two top-most issues faced by enterprise IT when doing virtualization. Until the first edition of the book, there was no in-depth coverage on the topic to tackle the issues systematically. The second edition expands the first edition, with added information and reorganizing the book into three logical parts. The first part provides the technical foundation of SDDC Management. It explains the difference between a software-defined data center and a classic physical data center, and how it impacts both architecture and operations. From this strategic view, it zooms into the most common challenges—performance management and capacity management. It introduces a new concept called Performance SLA and also a new way of doing capacity management. The next part provides the actual solution that you can implement in your environment. It puts the theories together and provides real-life examples created together with customers. It provides the reasons behind each dashboard, so that you get the understanding on why it is required and what problem it solves. The last part acts as a reference section. It provides a complete reference to vSphere and vRealize Operations counters, explaining their dependencies and providing practical guidance on the values you should expect in a healthy environment.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
VMware Performance and Capacity Management Second Edition
Credits
Foreword
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Index

Memory – not such a simple matter


Memory differs from CPU as it is a form of storage. Unlike CPU, which executes instructions as they enter it, memory keeps information for a much longer period of time. We are comparing nanoseconds to seconds (or longer, up to months, depending on the uptime of your VM). Information is stored in memory in standard block sizes, typically 4 KB or 2 MB. Each block is called a page. At the lowest level, the memory pages are just a series of zeroes and ones.

Keeping this concept in mind is useful as you review the memory counters. Memory has a very different nature compared to CPU, and the storage nature of memory is the reason why memory monitoring is more challenging than CPU monitoring.

Before you proceed with this section, you need to be familiar with vSphere memory management. The whitepaper at https://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10206 provides a good explanation. It is based on vSphere 5.0, but is still relevant in vSphere 6.0 Update 1. The only...