VMware vCloud Director gives enterprise organizations the ability to build secure private clouds that dramatically increase datacenter efficiency and business agility. Lots of new features have been added to vCloud Director 1.5 to accelerate application delivery in the cloud. In this paper, we discuss some of the features of the vCloud Director 1.5 release, performance characterizations including latency trends, resource consumptions, sizing guidelines and hardware requirements, and performance tuning tips.
Some highlights of vCloud Director performance and best practices include:
- When using fast provisioning (linked clones) and a VMFS datastore, do not exceed eight hosts in a cluster.
- Be aware that there is a chance to hit the snapshot chain length limit. If the current clone has become very slow compared to the prior clone, the clone may have hit the snapshot chain length limit 30. This can be resolved by virtual machine consolation.
- For virtual machines that are not generating I/O-intensive workloads, linked clones offer the flexibility and agility of instant provisioning.
- For cross-vCenter and cross-datastore linked clones, pre-allocating the vApp to the target datastore helps shorten the subsequent copy time.
For more details and performance tips, please refer to VMware vCloud Director 1.5 Performance and Best Practices.
Nice document, thanks for sharing.
Just a nit, figure 17in page 20, the screen shot seems to be from vSphere 4.x but the document is written for vSphere 5.0? No?
If we use fast provisioning, we know that we can spin up new VMs from our VCD catalog much quicker, as these new VMs are just links to the origin catalog entry. So we wanted to know, what happens if we spin up hundreds of new VMs with fast provisioning turned on, and the master catalog item becomes corrupt? Would that damage all of the child link-cloned vms? Does VMware have some way of protecting the master image?
thank you for keeping us informed.
helps a lot 🙂
the more often you post the better 😉