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

Using resource pool guidelines


ESXi provides several mechanisms to configure and adjust the allocation of CPU and memory resources for virtual machines. Thus, resource management configurations have a significant impact on virtual machine performance.

If you expect flexibility in the total available resources, then use shares but not reservations. It will allocate resources fairly across virtual machines. Even if you upgrade the hardware, each virtual machine stays at the same relative priority using shares. The relative priority remains the same even though each share represents a larger amount of memory or CPU.

Remember that shares will only be effective in case of resource contention. So, if you think you can get immediate effect on resources for a VM by increasing the number of shares, you are mistaken. Share values are used in order to determine the dynamic entitlement of a VM. The dynamic entitlement is used in order to determine fairness, but also to opportunistically distribute unused...