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Oracle Database Performance on vSphere 6.5 Monster Virtual Machines

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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.

 

Virtual SAP HANA Achieves Production Level Performance

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VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger announced production support for SAP HANA on VMware vSphere 5.5 at EMC World this week during his keynote. This is the end result of a very thorough joint testing project over the past year between VMware and SAP.

HANA is an in-memory platform (including database capabilities) from SAP that has enabled huge gains in performance for customers and has been a high priority for SAP over the past few years.  In order for HANA to be supported in a virtual machine on vSphere 5.5 for production workloads, we worked closely with SAP to enable, design, and measure in-depth performance tests.

In order to enable the testing and ongoing production support of SAP HANA on vSphere, two HANA appliance servers were ordered, shipped, and installed into SAP’s labs in Waldorf Germany.  These systems are dedicated to running SAP HANA on vSphere onsite at SAP.  Each system is an Intel Xeon E7-8870 (Westmere-EX) based four-socket server with 1TB of RAM.  They are used for performance testing and also for ongoing support of HANA on vSphere.  Additionally, VMware has onsite support engineering to assist with the testing and support.

SAP designed an extensive performance test suite that used a large number of test scenarios to stress all functions and capabilities of HANA running on vSphere 5.5.  They included OLAP and OLTP with a wide range of data sizes and query functions. In all, over one thousand individual test cases were used in this comprehensive test suite.  These same tests were run on identical native HANA systems and the difference between native and virtual tests was used as the key performance indicator.

In addition, we also tested vSphere features including vMotion, DRS, and VMware HA with virtual machines running HANA.  These tests were done with the HANA virtual machine under heavy stress.

The test results have been extremely positive and are one of the key factors in the announcement of production support.  The difference between virtual and native HANA across all the performance tests was on average within a few percentage points.

The vMotion, DRS, and VMware HA tests were all completed without issues.  Even with the large memory sizes of HANA virtual machines, we were still able to successfully migrate them with vMotion while under load with no issues.

One of the results of the extensive testing is a best practices guide for HANA on vSphere 5.5. This document includes a performance guide for running HANA on vSphere 5.5 based on this extensive testing.  The document also includes information about how to size a virtual HANA instance and how VMware HA can be used in conjunction with HANA’s own replication technology for high availability.

VMware Horizon View 5.2 Performance & Best Practices and A Performance Deep Dive on Hardware Accelerated 3D Graphics

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VMware Horizon View 5.2 simplifies desktop and application management while increasing security and control and delivers a personalized high fidelity experience for end-users across sessions and devices. It enables higher availability and agility of desktop services unmatched by traditional PCs while reducing the total cost of desktop ownership and end-users can enjoy new levels of productivity and the freedom to access desktops from more devices and locations while giving IT greater policy control.

Recently, we published two whitepapers to provide a performance deep-dive on Horizon View 5.2 performance and hardware accelerated 3D graphics (vSGA) feature. The links to these whitepapers are as follows:

* VMware Horizon View 5.2 Performance and Best Practices
* VMware Horizon View 5.2 and Hardware Accelerated 3D Graphics

The first whitepaper describes View 5.2 new features, including access of View desktops with Horizon, space efficient sparse (SEsparse) disks, hardware accelerated 3D graphics, and full support of Windows 8 desktops. View 5.2 performance improvements in PCoIP and View management are highlighted. In addition, this paper presents View 5.2 PCoIP performance results, Windows 8 and RDP 8 performance analysis, and a vSGA performance analysis, including how vSGA compares to the software renderer support introduced in View 5.1.

The second whitepaper goes in-depth on the support for hardware accelerated 3D graphics that debuted with VMware vSphere 5.1 and VMware Horizon View 5.2 and presents performance and consolidation results for a number of different workloads, ranging from knowledge workers using 3D desktops to performance-intensive CAD-based workloads. Because the intensity of a 3D workload will vary greatly from user to user and application to application, rather than highlighting specific case studies, we demonstrate how the solution efficiently scales for both light- and heavy-weight 3D workloads, until GPU or CPU resources are fully utilized. This paper also presents key best practices to extract peak performance from a 3D View 5.2 deployment.

vCenter Server 5.1 Database Performance with Large Inventories

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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

 

VMware vCloud Director 1.0 Performance and Best Practices — Paper Published

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Do you want to know how many VMware vCloud Director server instances are needed for your deployment? Do you know how to load balance the VC Listener across multiple vCloud Director instances? Are you curious about how OVF File Upload behaves on a WAN environment? What is the most efficient way to import LDAP users? This white paper, VMware vCloud Director 1.0 Performance and Best Practices, provides insight  to help you answer all the above questions.

In this paper, we discuss VMware vCloud Director 1.0 architecture, server instance sizing, LDAP sync, OVF file upload, vApp clones across vCenter Server instances, inventory sync, and adjusting thread pool and cache limits. The following performance tips are provided:

  • Ensure the inventory cache size is big enough to hold all inventory objects.
  • Ensure JVM heap size is big enough to satisfy the memory requirement for the inventory cache and memory burst  so the vCloud Director server does not run out of memory.
  • Import LDAP users by groups instead of importing individual users one by one.
  • Ensure the system is not running LDAP sync too frequently because the vCloud database is updated at regular intervals.
  • In order to help load balance disk I/O, separate the storage location for OVF uploads from the location of the vCloud Director server logs. 
  • Have a central datastore to hold the most popular vApp templates and media files and have this datastore mounted to at least one ESX host per cluster.
  • Be aware that the latency to deploy a vApp in fence mode has a static cost and does not increase proportionately with the number of VMs in the vApp.
  • Deploy multiple vApps concurrently to achieve high throughput. 
  • For load balancing purposes, it is possible to move a VC Listener to another vCloud Director instance by reconnecting the vCenter Server through the vCloud Director user interface.

Please read the white paper for more performance tips with more details. You can download the full white paper from here.

VMware vCenter Server Performance and Best Practices for vSphere 4.1

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VMware recently released a white paper on
performance and best practices for vCenter Server in VMware vSphere 4.1. This
paper addresses four common areas of concerns regarding vCenter Server
performance:

  • Performance improvements in vSphere 4.1 compared to vSphere 4.0
  • vCenter Server sizing guidelines and software requirements
  • Best practices in performance monitoring, tuning and troubleshooting
  • Case studies demonstrating performance improvements in vSphere 4.1.

The vCenter Server in vSphere 4.1 supports a larger
inventory in a vSphere environment when compared with that supported in vSphere
4.0, both at the vCenter Server level and at the single cluster level. A table
is provided in the white paper to show the new supported limits. In addition,
in vSphere 4.1, vCenter Server can handle a larger number of concurrent tasks
at a time when compared with vSphere 4.0.

Significant performance improvements have been made in vSphere
4.1 compared to vSphere 4.0. The following list highlights some of the most
important performance improvements:

  • Improved performance at higher vCenter Server inventory limits – up to 7 times higher operational throughput and up to 75% reduced operational
    latency
  • Improved performance at higher cluster inventory limits – up to 3
    times higher operational throughput and up to 60% reduced operational latency
  • Faster vCenter Server startup – around 5 minutes for maximum
    vCenter Server inventory size
  • Better vSphere Client responsiveness, quicker user interaction,
    and faster user login
  • Faster host operations and VM operations on standalone hosts – up
    to 60% reduction in latency
  • Lower resource usage by vCenter agents by up to 40%
  • Reduced VM group power-on latency by up to 25%
  • Faster VM recovery with HA – up to 60% reduction in total
    recovery time for 1.6 times more VMs
  • Better load balancing with improved DRS/DPM algorithm
    effectiveness

For more information, please read the full paper: VMware vCenter
Server Performance and Best Practices for vSphere 4.1.