Home > Blogs > VMware VROOM! Blog

Oracle Database Performance on vSphere 6.5 Monster Virtual Machines

We have just published a new whitepaper on the performance of Oracle databases on vSphere 6.5 monster virtual machines. We took a look at the performance of the largest virtual machines possible on the previous four generations of four-socket Intel-based servers. The results show how performance of these large virtual machines continues to scale with the increases and improvements in server hardware.

Oracle Database Monster VM Performance across 4 generations of Intel based servers on vSphere 6.5

Oracle Database Monster VM Performance on vSphere 6.5 across 4 generations of Intel-based four-socket servers

In addition to vSphere 6.5 and the four-socket Intel-based servers used in the testing, an IBM FlashSystem A9000 high performance all flash array was used. This array provided extreme low latency performance that enabled the database virtual machines to perform at the achieved high levels of performance.

Please read the full paper, Oracle Monster Virtual Machine Performance on VMware vSphere 6.5, for details on hardware, software, test setup, results, and more cool graphs. The paper also covers performance gain from Hyper-Threading, performance effect of NUMA, and best practices for Oracle monster virtual machines. These best practices are focused on monster virtual machines, and it is recommended to also check out the full Oracle Databases on VMware Best Practices Guide.

Some similar tests with Microsoft SQL Server monster virtual machines were also recently completed on vSphere 6.5 by my colleague David Morse. Please see his blog post and whitepaper for the full details.

This work on Oracle is in some ways a follow up to Project Capstone from 2015 and the resulting whitepaper Peeking at the Future with Giant Monster Virtual Machines . That project dealt with monster VM performance from a slightly different angle and might be interesting to those who are also interested in this paper and its results.

Weathervane, a benchmarking tool for virtualized infrastructure and the cloud, is now open source.

7 Replies

Weathervane is a performance benchmarking tool developed at VMware. It lets you assess the performance of your virtualized or cloud environment by driving a load against a realistic application and capturing relevant performance metrics. You might use it to compare the performance characteristics of two different environments, or to understand the performance impact of some change in an existing environment.

Weathervane is very flexible, allowing you to configure almost every aspect of a test, and yet is easy to use thanks to tools that help prepare your test environment and a powerful run harness that automates almost every aspect of your performance tests. You can typically go from a fresh start to running performance tests with a large multi-tier application in a single day.

Weathervane supports a number of advanced capabilities, such as deploying multiple independent application instances, deploying application services in containers, driving variable loads, and allowing run-time configuration changes for measuring elasticity-related performance metrics.

Weathervane has been used extensively within VMware, and is now open source and available on GitHub at https://github.com/vmware/weathervane.

The rest of this blog gives an overview of the primary features of Weathervane.

Continue reading →

DRS Cluster Resource Management with Reservation and Shares

1 Reply

Resource management in vSphere is very robust and sophisticated. It provides settings like reservation, limits and shares (a.k.a. RLS), which can be applied on virtual machines (VMs) and resource pools. These settings can be used as knobs to isolate resources, prioritize them, or to guarantee availability of resources to VMs in a cluster. Our customers have often asked about how these settings impact availability of resources for a VM.

Recently we published a white paper based on our study, to explain how reservation and shares can impact resource availability for VMs when they are applied on VMs versus when they are applied on resource pools. In the paper, we also share some general guidelines on when and how these settings can be used.

vCenter 6.5 Performance: what does 6x mean?

2 Replies

At the VMworld 2016 Barcelona keynote, CTO Ray O’Farrell proudly presented the performance improvements in vCenter 6.5. He showed the following slide:

Slide from Ray O’Farrell’s keynote at VMworld 2016 Barcelona, showing 2x improvement in scale from 6.0 to 6.5 and 6x improvement in throughput from 5.5 to 6.5.

As a senior performance engineer who focuses on vCenter, and as one of the presenters of VMworld Session INF8108 (listed in the top-right corner of the slide above), I have received a number of questions regarding the “6x” and “2x scale” labels in the slide above. This blog is an attempt to explain these numbers by describing (at a high level) the performance improvements for vCenter in 6.5. I will focus specifically on the vCenter Appliance in this post.

Continue reading →

SQL Server VM Performance with VMware vSphere 6.5

1 Reply

Achieving optimal SQL Server performance on vSphere has been a constant focus here at VMware; I’ve published past performance studies with vSphere 5.5 and 6.0 which showed excellent performance up to the maximum VM size supported at the time.

Since then, there have been quite a few changes! While this study uses a similar test methodology, it features an updated hypervisor (vSphere 6.5), database engine (SQL Server 2016), OLTP benchmark (DVD Store 3), and CPUs (Intel Xeon v4 processors with 24 cores per socket, codenamed Broadwell-EX).

Continue reading →

Performance of Storage I/O Control (SIOC) with SSD Datastores – vSphere 6.5

1 Reply

With Storage I/O Control (SIOC), vSphere 6.5 administrators can adjust the storage performance of VMs so that VMs with critical workloads will get the I/Os per second (IOPS) they need. Admins assign shares (the proportion of IOPS allocated to the VM), limits (the upper bound of VM IOPS), and reservations (the lower bound of VM IOPS) to the VMs whose IOPS need to be controlled. After shares, limits, and reservations have been set, SIOC is automatically triggered to meet the desired policies for the VMs.

A recently published paper shows the performance of SIOC meets expectations and successfully controls the number of IOPS for VM workloads.

Continue reading →

Virtual Machine vCPU and vNUMA Rightsizing – Rules of Thumb

30 Replies

Using virtualization, we have all enjoyed the flexibility to quickly create virtual machines with various virtual CPU (vCPU) configurations for a diverse set of workloads. But as we virtualize larger and more demanding workloads, like databases, on top of the latest generations of processors with up to 24 cores, special care must be taken in vCPU and vNUMA configuration to ensure performance is optimized.

Continue reading →

Machine Learning on vSphere 6 with Nvidia GPUs – Episode 2

4 Replies

by Hari Sivaraman, Uday Kurkure, and Lan Vu

In a previous blog [1], we looked at how machine learning workloads (MNIST and CIFAR-10) using TensorFlow running in vSphere 6 VMs in an NVIDIA GRID configuration reduced the training time from hours to minutes when compared to the same system running no virtual GPUs.

Here, we extend our study to multiple workloads—3D CAD and machine learning—run at the same time vs. run independently on a same vSphere server.

Continue reading →

New Fling released – IOInsight

3 Replies

By Sankaran Sivathanu

VMware IOInsight is a tool to help people understand a VM’s storage I/O behavior. By understanding their VM’s I/O characteristics, customers can make better decisions about storage capacity planning and performance tuning. IOInsight ships as a virtual appliance that can be deployed in any vSphere environment and includes an intuitive web-based UI that allows users to choose VMDKs to monitor and view results.

Where does IOInsight help?

Customers may better tune and size their storage.
When contacting VMware Support for any vSphere storage issues, including a report from IOInsight can help VMware Support better understand the issues and can potentially lead to faster resolutions.
VMware Engineering can optimize products with a better understanding of various customers’ application behavior.

IOInsight captures I/O traces from ESXi and generates various aggregated metrics that represent the I/O behavior. The IOInsight report contains only these aggregated metrics and there is no sensitive information about the application itself. In addition to the built-in metrics computed by IOInsight, users can also write new analyzer plugins to IOInsight and visualize the results. A comprehensive SDK and development guide is included in the download bundle.

The fling works with vSphere 5.5 or above and can be downloaded at https://labs.vmware.com/flings/ioinsight.

from VMware's performance team