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.