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

Guest OS networking considerations


Please refer to Chapter 3, Networking Performance Design, where the Selecting the correct virtual network adapter recipe talks about the tradeoff factors in choosing the correct adapter.

For the best performance, use the vmxnet3 network adapter for operating systems in which it is supported. The virtual machine must use virtual hardware version 7 or later, and VMware Tools must be installed in the guest operating system.

  • If vmxnet3 is not supported in your guest operating system, use enhanced vmxnet (which requires VMware Tools). Both enhanced vmxnet (vmxnet2) and vmxnet3 support jumbo frames for better performance.

  • If vmxnet2 is not supported in your guest operating system, use the flexible device type. This device type automatically converts each vlance adapter to a vmxnet adapter if VMware Tools are installed.

For the best networking performance, use network adapters that support hardware features such as TCP checksum offload, TCP segmentation offload, and...