We’re pleased to announce the availability of Performance Best Practices for vSphere 5.1. This is a book designed to help system administrators obtain the best performance from vSphere 5.1 deployments.
The book addresses many of the new features in vSphere 5.1 from a performance perspective. These include:
- Use of a system swap file to reduce VMkernel and related memory usage
- Flex SE linked clones that can relinquish storage space when it’s no longer needed
- Use of jumbo frames for hardware iSCSI
- Single Root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV), allowing direct guest access to hardware devices
- Enhancements to SplitRx mode, a feature allowing network packets received in a single network queue to be processed on multiple physical CPUs
- Enhancements to the vSphere Web Client
- VMware Cross-Host Storage vMotion, which allows virtual machines to be moved simultaneously across both hosts and datastores
We’ve also updated and expanded on many of the topics in the book.
These topic 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), Distributed Power Management (DPM), and Storage DRS performance
- High Availability (HA), Fault Tolerance (FT), and VMware vCenter Update Manager performance
- VMware vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) and vCenter Single Sign on Server performance
The book can be found at: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere5.1.pdf.