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

Improving performance through VMDirectPath I/O


VMware vSphere DirectPath I/O leverages Intel VT-d and AMD-Vi hardware support to allow guest operating systems to directly access hardware devices. In the case of networking, vSphere DirectPath I/O allows the virtual machine to access a physical NIC directly rather than using an emulated device or a paravirtualized device. An example of an emulated device is the E 1000 virtual NIC, and examples of paravirtualized devices are the VMXNET and VMXNET 3 virtual network adapters. vSphere DirectPath I/O provides limited increases in throughput, but it reduces the CPU cost for networking intensive workloads.

vSphere DirectPath I/O is not compatible with certain core virtualization features. However, when you run ESXi on certain vendor configurations, vSphere DirectPath I/O for networking is compatible with the following:

  • vSphere vMotion

  • Hot adding and removing of virtual devices, suspend and resume

  • VMware vSphere® high availability

  • VMware vSphere® Distributed...