Better performance, lower latency, and streamlined statistics are just some of the new features you can expect to find in the vCenter Server in version 5.1. The VMware performance team has published a paper about vCenter Server 5.1 database performance in large environments. The paper shows that statistics collection creates the biggest performance impact on the vCenter Server database. In vSphere 5.1, several aspects of statistics collection have been changed to improve the overall performance of the database. There were three sources of I/O to the statistics tables in vCenter Server—inserting statistics, rolling up statistics between different intervals, and deleting statistics when they expire. These activities have been improved by changing the way the relevant data is persisted to the tables, by partitioning the tables instead of using staging tables. In addition, by removing the staging tables, statistics collection is more robust, resolving the issues described in KB 2011523 and KB 1003878. Scalability is also improved by allowing larger inventories to be supported because they don’t take so long to read/write data from the old staging tables. The paper also includes best practices to take advantage of these changes in environments where vCenter Server has a large inventory. For more details, see vCenter Server 5.1 Database Performance in Large-Scale Environments.
Here are the URLs for the paper, “VMware vCenter Server 5.1 Database Performance Improvements and Best Practices for Large-Scale Environments”:
http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10302
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMware-vCenter-DBPerfBestPractices.pdf