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

Multilayer storage


Virtualization increases the complexity of monitoring storage performance. Just like memory, where we have more than one level, we have three levels for storage. At the highest level, we have VMs. A VM typically has two to three virtual disks (or RDMs), such as an OS drive, paging file drive, and data drive. A large database VM will have even more.

We are interested in data both at the VM level and at the individual virtual disk level. If you are running a VM with a large data drive (for example, an Oracle database), the performance of the data drive is what the VM owner cares about the most. At the VM level, you get the average of all drives; hence, the performance issue could be masked out.

Below the VM level, we have the datastore level. What you can see at this level and, hence, how you monitor, depends on the storage architecture. We will cover the centralized storage architecture first as it is a more deployment. We will cover the distributed architecture separately...