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Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 5.0

A new version of Performance Best Practices for vSphere is now available.  This is a book designed to help system administrators obtain the best performance from vSphere deployments.

We've addressed many of the new features in vSphere 5.0 from a performance perspective.  These include:

  • Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (Storage DRS), which performs automatic storage I/O load balancing
  • Virtual NUMA, allowing guests to make efficient use of hardware NUMA architecture
  • Memory compression, which can reduce the need for host-level swapping
  • Swap to host cache, which can dramatically reduce the impact of host-level swapping
  • SplitRx mode, which improves network performance for certain workloads
  • VMX swap, which reduces per-VM memory reservation
  • Multiple vMotion vmknics, allowing for more and faster vMotion operations

We've also significantly updated and expanded many of the topics we've covered in previous editions of the book.  These include:

  • Choosing hardware for a vSphere deployment
  • Power management
  • Configuring ESXi for best performance
  • Guest operating system performance
  • vCenter and vCenter database performance
  • vMotion and Storage vMotion performance
  • Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and Distributed Power Management (DPM) performance
  • High Availability (HA), Fault Tolerance (FT), and VMware vCenter Update Manager performance

The book can be found at: Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 5.0.