Book Image

vSphere High Performance Cookbook - Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Kevin Elder, Christopher Kusek, Prasenjit Sarkar
Book Image

vSphere High Performance Cookbook - Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Kevin Elder, Christopher Kusek, Prasenjit Sarkar

Overview of this book

vSphere is a mission-critical piece of software for many businesses. It is a complex tool, and incorrect design and deployment can create performance related issues that can negatively affect the business. This book is focused on solving these problems as well as providing best practices and performance-enhancing techniques. This edition is fully updated to include all the new features in version 6.5 as well as the latest tools and techniques to keep vSphere performing at its best. This book starts with interesting recipes, such as the interaction of vSphere 6.5 components with physical layers such as CPU, memory, and networking. Then we focus on DRS, resource control design, and vSphere cluster design. Next, you’ll learn about storage performance design and how it works with VMware vSphere 6.5. Moving on, you will learn about the two types of vCenter installation and the benefits of each. Lastly, the book covers performance tools that help you get the most out of your vSphere installation. By the end of this book, you will be able to identify, diagnose, and troubleshoot operational faults and critical performance issues in vSphere 6.5.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Impact of VM swap file placement


The creation of a VM's swap file is automatic. By default, this file is created in the VM's working directory, but a different location can be set.

Swap file contains swapped memory pages and its size is determined as allocated RAM size—reservation. If performance is important in the design, 100 percent memory reservations should be created, causing no need to swap to disk.

You can optionally configure a special host cache on an SSD (if one is installed) to be used for the swap to host cache feature. This swap cache is shared by all the VMs running on the host. In addition, host-level swapping of the VMs' most active pages benefits from the low latency of SSD. The swap to host cache feature makes the best use of potentially limited SSD space. This feature is also optimized for large block sizes where some SSDs work best.

If a host does not use the swap to host cache feature, place the VM swap files on low latency, high bandwidth storage systems. The best choice...