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

Designing a highly available and high-performance iSCSI SAN


Main advantage why people use iSCSI SANs is that they handle longer transmission distances and are less expensive over Fiber Channel SANs.

iSCSI SAN's performance mainly gets affected by network congestion. Most of the time network congestion is usually the result of an inappropriate network configuration or improper network settings.

For example, a common problem what we see is a switch in the data path into the storage system that is fragmenting frames. It happens most of the time for jumbo frames, and network oversubscription also plays a crucial role there. A slow switch somewhere in the path can reduce the overall speed of the network connection because of this slowest link.

Getting ready

To step through this recipe, you will need one or more running ESXi Servers, an iSCSI SAN, and couple of VLANs provisioned on the network switch side. No other prerequisites are required.

How to do it...

For better performance and security you should...