Book Image

VMware Performance and Capacity Management, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Sunny Dua
Book Image

VMware Performance and Capacity Management, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Sunny Dua

Overview of this book

Performance management and capacity management are the two top-most issues faced by enterprise IT when doing virtualization. Until the first edition of the book, there was no in-depth coverage on the topic to tackle the issues systematically. The second edition expands the first edition, with added information and reorganizing the book into three logical parts. The first part provides the technical foundation of SDDC Management. It explains the difference between a software-defined data center and a classic physical data center, and how it impacts both architecture and operations. From this strategic view, it zooms into the most common challenges—performance management and capacity management. It introduces a new concept called Performance SLA and also a new way of doing capacity management. The next part provides the actual solution that you can implement in your environment. It puts the theories together and provides real-life examples created together with customers. It provides the reasons behind each dashboard, so that you get the understanding on why it is required and what problem it solves. The last part acts as a reference section. It provides a complete reference to vSphere and vRealize Operations counters, explaining their dependencies and providing practical guidance on the values you should expect in a healthy environment.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
VMware Performance and Capacity Management Second Edition
Credits
Foreword
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Index

Network counters at the VM level


The following screenshot shows the counters vCenter provides for network at the VM layer. The counters are available at each individual vNIC level and at the VM level. Most VMs will only have one vNIC, so the data at the VM and vNIC levels will be identical. The vNICs are named using the 400x convention.

This means that the first vNIC is 4000, the second vNIC is 4001, and so on:

VM network counters

As usual, let's approach the counters, starting with contention. There is no latency counter, so you cannot track how long it takes for a packet to reach its destination. There are, however, counters that track dropped packets. Dropped packets need to be retransmitted and therefore increase network latency from the application point of view. vCenter does not provide a counter to track packet retransmits.

vRealize Operations provides a latency counter, which uses packet drops as an indicator. Using a percentage is certainly easier than dealing with the raw counters...