vSphere High Performance Cookbook

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.

vSphere High Performance Cookbook

Credits

About the Author

About the Reviewers

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

CPU Performance Design

Introduction

Critical performance consideration – VMM scheduler

CPU scheduler – processor topology/cache aware

Ready time – warning sign

Hyperthreaded core sharing

Spotting CPU overcommitment

Fighting guest CPU saturation in SMP VMs

Controlling CPU resources using resource settings

What is most important to monitor in CPU performance

CPU performance best practices

Memory Performance Design

Introduction

Virtual memory reclamation techniques

Monitoring host-swapping activity

Monitoring host-ballooning activity

Keeping memory free for VMkernel

Key memory performance metrics to monitor

What metrics not to use

Identifying when memory is the problem

Analyzing host and VM memory

Memory performance best practices

Networking Performance Design

Introduction

Designing a network for load balancing and failover for vSphere Standard Switch

Designing a network for load balancing and failover for vSphere Distributed Switch

What to know when offloading checksum

Selecting the correct virtual network adapter

Improving performance through VMDirectPath I/O

Improving performance through NetQueue

Improving network performance using the SplitRx mode for multicast traffic

Designing a multi-NIC vMotion

Improving network performance using network I/O control

Monitoring network capacity and performance matrix

DRS, SDRS, and Resource Control Design

Introduction

Using DRS algorithm guidelines

Using resource pool guidelines

Avoiding using resource pool as folder structure

Choosing the best SIOC latency threshold

Using storage capability and profile driven storage

Anti-affinity rules in the SDRS cluster

Avoiding the use of SDRS I/O Metric and array-based automatic tiering together

Using VMware SIOC and array-based automatic tiering together

vSphere Cluster Design

Introduction

Trade-off factors while designing scale up and scale out clusters

Using VM Monitoring

vSphere Fault Tolerance design and its impact

DPM and its impact

Choosing the reserved cluster failover capacity

Rightly choosing the vSphere HA cluster size

Storage Performance Design

Introduction

Designing the host for a highly available and high-performing storage

Designing a highly available and high-performance iSCSI SAN

Designing a highly available and high-performing FC storage

Performance impact of queuing on the storage array and host

Factors that affect storage performance

Using VAAI to boost storage performance

Selecting the right VM disk type

Monitoring command queuing

Identifying a severely overloaded storage

Designing vCenter and vCenter Database for Best Performance

Introduction

vCenter Single Sign-On and its database preparation

vCenter Single Sign-On and its deployment

Things to bear in mind while designing the vCenter platform

Designing vCenter Server for redundancy

Designing a highly available vCenter database

vCenter database size and location affects performance

Considering vCenter Server Certificates to minimize security threats

Designing vCenter Server for Auto Deploy

Virtual Machine and Application Performance Design

Introduction

Setting the right time in Guest OS

vNUMA (Virtual NUMA) considerations

Choosing the SCSI controller for storage

Impact of VM swap file placement

Using large pages in virtual machines

Guest OS networking considerations

When you should or should not virtualize an application

Measuring the application's performance

Index

Customer Reviews

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Rightly choosing the vSphere HA cluster size

With vSphere 5, we have seen a significant change in the HA model and that does relax the constraint on the size of your vSphere HA cluster. But, you may ask, what about storage bottlenecks while accessing the same storage by a large cluster? We have VAAI to handle that now, and that being in picture does not constrain you from choosing a large cluster.

Also a crucial factor is that large cluster creates more scheduling opportunities for DRS and a bigger cluster does not impose a heavy lift on the cost. Does that mean, we suggest "ONLY" bigger cluster and not many smaller clusters? Well, not really. It all boils down to what you are going to use on that cluster, and what is your requirement. If you are implementing View Manager and are going to use Linked Clone then you are limiting yourself with eight hosts, as with Linked Clone only eight hosts can access one single file. This restriction is not there in vSphere 5.1.

There are a few other factors...

vSphere High Performance Cookbook

vSphere High Performance Cookbook

Overview of this book

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vSphere High Performance Cookbook

Rightly choosing the vSphere HA cluster size