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 VM Monitoring


When you enable VM Monitoring, the VM Monitoring service, which is serviced by VMware Tools, evaluates whether each virtual machine in the cluster is running or not. Regular heartbeats and I/O activity from the VMware Tools process will be checked by the VM Monitoring service to determine the running guest.

Sometimes, VM heartbeats or I/O activity are not received by the VM Monitoring Service because the guest operating system has failed or VMware Tools is not being allocated time to complete its tasks. If the VM Monitoring Service does not get to listen to those heartbeats, then it declares that the virtual machine has failed and the virtual machine is rebooted to restore service.

The VM Monitoring service also monitors a virtual machine's I/O activity just to avoid unnecessary resets. If there are no heartbeats received within the failure interval, the I/O stats interval (a cluster level attribute) is checked. The I/O stats interval (by default 120 seconds) determines...