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Category Archives: Performance

Preview – Extreme Performance Series: Monster Virtual Machines

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This year at VMworld (both San Francisco and Barcelona) performance will be front and center.  I’ve been working internally to create a “mini-track” of technically advanced performance breakouts with many of our actual performance engineers as speakers.  Customers always want to know about best practices, troubleshooting and just how far vSphere can push the performance envelope and that’s very hard to do in a 60 minute session.  So this year I’ve got approval to try something different. Continue reading →

Proving Performance: Hadoop On vSphere – A Bare Metal Comparison

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When architects think about putting big data and Apache Hadoop on virtualized commodity servers they usually see virtualization as a performance deterrent.  Virtualization software is just that—software. Additional software layers are overhead and they must make it run slower.

Not true.

In a recent performance study by VMware, they demonstrated that performance between bare-metal deployments and virtualized deployments can even exceed bare-metal performance in certain cases when using multiple virtual machines allowing for parallelism.

Just like the data industry proved that distributed querying is faster and more scalable than a single monolithic source, VMware believes that performance can improve with virtualization and is working on a variety of projects including Hadoop Virtualization Extensions (HVE) and Serengeti, as well as working with vendors like Cloudera to certify their Hadoop distributions on vSphere. Continue reading →

vCloud Director Cell Recommendations for JVM Heap Size

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I was recently asked to provide a recommendation for tuning the JVM heap size on vCD 1.5 cells.  In researching this I pulled up the vCloud Director Performance and Best Practices white papers for vCD 1.0, vCD 1.5 and vCD 5.1 where I found the following recommendations:

vCloud Director 1.0

vCD 1.0 recommends tuning the heap size based on the size of the inventory:

“By default, JVM heap size is configured to be 1GB for the process.  This is good for supporting 5000 inventory cache entries.  If the number of cached entries is changed, for example to 15,000 (an additional 10,000) for a large vCloud Director installation, you might need to increate the JVM heap size to support additional cache entries.”

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Tech Marketing at Partner Exchange 2013

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Still have some empty spots in your PEX calendar?

Let me recommend a few sessions being brought to you by some of our Tech Marketing team in the Cloud Infrastructure team!

Arranged by presenter’s name, not priority (because CI1130 would be at the top of the list then…)

Cormac Hogan

  • TEX1138 – vSphere 5.1 New Storage Features

Harry Smith

  • CI1502 – Selling IAAS with VMware vCloud Director

Jeff Hunter

  • CI1127 – vSphere Data Protection – Technical Deep Dive
  • CI1130 – High Availability, Data Protection, and Disaster Recovery in a VMware Virtualized Environment Workshop

Justin King

  • CI1545 - vSphere – Deployment Best Practices
  • CI1544 - vSphere Web Client - Technical Walkthrough

Ken Werneburg

  • CI1130 – High Availability, Data Protection, and Disaster Recovery in a VMware Virtualized Environment Workshop
  • CI1435 – Site Recovery Manager – Technical Walkthrough

Kyle Gleed

  • CI1144 – vSphere – Upgrade Best Practices
  • CI1545 – vSphere – Deployment Best Practices

Mark Achtemichuk

  • CI1149 – Virtualizing Business Critical Applications for Maximum Performance
  • CI1119 – Performance Deep Dive of the VMware Hands on Lab Cloud

Ranga Maddipudi and Vyenkatesh Deshpande

  • CI1440 – VMware vCloud Networking and Security Workshop

Vyenkatesh Deshpande

  • CI1225 – vSphere Distributed Switch – What’s New

 

**EDIT  - Oops, how could I have forgotten this session?

Rawlinson Rivera

  • CI1244 –  vSphere Storage Appliance – What’s New

The Performance Cost of SMP – The Reason for Rightsizing

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Rightsizing is an important operational process that does affect performance.  VMware recognizes this and recommends the use of vCenter Operations to assist in identifying under/oversized workloads within your infrastructures.  The value of rightsizing helps to ensure maximum performance of your workloads and the efficient use of your underlying hardware.  It is very easy today to add resources to a virtual machine when required so we need to get away from our habit of over provisioning.

Many often wonder if there is overhead when creating a large virtual machine with many vCPUs that may or may not be used.  Is there waste in doing that?  Why not make all my virtual machines excessive and let the vSphere scheduler sort it out?

Well the simple answer is that – yes – if you build an inefficient virtual machine with too many vCPUs that will not be used, there is waste.  If the workload is rightsized though, you will still maintain a high level of efficiency.

Let’s take a look at the data:

 

Continue reading →

Troubleshooting Performance Comparisons (with cheat sheet)

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When someone experiences a performance comparison issue when a workload is moved from physical to virtual (or from another virtual platform/system) this is how I approach diagnosing it or identifying why performance was different.

Let me start by saying that using current infrastructure and the latest versions of vSphere, there should be little or no performance difference between physical and virtual.  Very rarely is a true issue or an incompatible application identified.  The most common reason people see an issue with comparisons is a result of the following:

  • A poorly conceived performance test
  • A mis-configuration within the hardware/software stack
  • Hardware differences between the tests

While this might seem obvious, it happens far too frequently in my experience.  As a result, I approach these situations by doing two things.  First, explain and encourage the adoption of my golden rules for comparisons.  Secondly, use the cheat sheet below to document details in the environment which usually bubbles up some sort of difference.

Here are my golden rules for performance comparisons:

Continue reading →

vSphere 5.1 – VMDK versus RDM

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It seems the debate between using a VMDK on VMFS or an RDM still rages when it comes to the question which one is better for performance.

The VMware team has published a lot of evidence in the past that the difference is very minor, in fact difficult to measure accurately and probably unperceivable to customers.  Definitely not worth giving up the value of encapsulating a VM.

Published Dec 7, 2007 (on ESX 3.0.1)
http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/1019

Published Feb 13, 2008 (on ESX 3.5)
http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/1040

Let’s take a look at some new internal data for vSphere 5.1 that continues to validate that VMDK is the right default choice.

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What is the difference between PCPU Used and PCPU Utilized?

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I’m often asked the question when looking at vSphere statistics – “What is the difference between PCPU Used and PCPU Utilized and why don’t they match?” Let’s take a look as it can be somewhat complex.

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Beta Customers Wanted!

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VMware currently has a beta program available for the VMware vCenter Support Assistant.  This product is designed to help customers accelerate the support process when they have issues by allowing them to open support cases and automatically collect and send diagnostic information to VMware right from their vSphere client.

There’s a lot of information on the functionality of the VMware vCenter Support Assistant on the TAM blog here.  If interested, you can sign up for the beta here and it will run through from now until mid-December.

Memory Performance Counters – An Evolved Look at Memory Management

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vSphere memory management has evolved over the years taking advantage of new technologies and techniques like using large memory pages, compressing memory, and using solid state devices (SSDs) for swap caching. This evolution has changed the way we need to look at memory usage and memory over-commitment in vSphere virtualized environments. To understand memory management and usage in vSphere we need to understand the metrics available to us, what they mean, and how to use them.

Continue reading →