Do you want to know how many VMware vCloud Director server instances are needed for your deployment? Do you know how to load balance the VC Listener across multiple vCloud Director instances? Are you curious about how OVF File Upload behaves on a WAN environment? What is the most efficient way to import LDAP users? This white paper, VMware vCloud Director 1.0 Performance and Best Practices, provides insight to help you answer all the above questions.
In this paper, we discuss VMware vCloud Director 1.0 architecture, server instance sizing, LDAP sync, OVF file upload, vApp clones across vCenter Server instances, inventory sync, and adjusting thread pool and cache limits. The following performance tips are provided:
- Ensure the inventory cache size is big enough to hold all inventory objects.
- Ensure JVM heap size is big enough to satisfy the memory requirement for the inventory cache and memory burst so the vCloud Director server does not run out of memory.
- Import LDAP users by groups instead of importing individual users one by one.
- Ensure the system is not running LDAP sync too frequently because the vCloud database is updated at regular intervals.
- In order to help load balance disk I/O, separate the storage location for OVF uploads from the location of the vCloud Director server logs.
- Have a central datastore to hold the most popular vApp templates and media files and have this datastore mounted to at least one ESX host per cluster.
- Be aware that the latency to deploy a vApp in fence mode has a static cost and does not increase proportionately with the number of VMs in the vApp.
- Deploy multiple vApps concurrently to achieve high throughput.
- For load balancing purposes, it is possible to move a VC Listener to another vCloud Director instance by reconnecting the vCenter Server through the vCloud Director user interface.
Please read the white paper for more performance tips with more details. You can download the full white paper from here.