It is my great pleasure to announce that VMmark 3.1 is generally available as of February 7, 2019!
What’s New?
This release adds support for persistent memory, improves workload scalability, and better reflects secure customer environments by increasing side-channel vulnerability mitigation requirements.
Visit our main VMmark HTML page for more information.
Please note that VMmark 3.0 will end of life on March 15th, 2019.
To learn more about VMmark3 see the introductory blog article here
VMware Cloud on AWS is a hybrid cloud service that runs the VMware software-defined data center (SDDC) stack in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud. The service automatically provisions and deploys a vSphere environment on a bare-metal AWS infrastructure, and lets you run your applications in a hybrid IT environment across your on-premises data centers and AWS global infrastructure. A key benefit of VMware Cloud on AWS is the ability to vMotion workloads back and forth from your on-premises data center to the AWS public cloud as capacity and data privacy require.
In this blog post, we share the results of our vMotion performance tests across our hybrid cloud environment that consisted of a vSphere on-premises data center located in Wenatchee, Washington and an SDDC hosted in an AWS cloud, in various scenarios including hybrid migration of a database server. We also describe the best practices to follow when migrating virtual machines by vMotion across hybrid cloud.
By Amitabha Banerjee and Abhishek Srivastava
The vSAN Performance Diagnostics feature, which helps customers to optimize their benchmarks or their vSAN configurations to achieve the best possible performance, was first introduced in vSphere 6.5 U1. vSAN Performance Diagnostics is a “cloud connected” feature and requires participation in the VMware Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP). Performance metrics and data are collected from the vSAN cluster and are sent to the VMware Cloud. The data is analyzed and the results are sent back for display in the vCenter Client. These results are shown as performance issues, where each issue includes a problem with its description and a link to a KB article.
In this blog, we describe how vSAN Performance Diagnostics can be used with HCIBench and show the new feature in vSphere 6.7 U1 that provides HCIBench specific issues and recommendations.
What is HCIBench?
HCIBench (Hyper-converged Infrastructure Benchmark) is a standard benchmark that vSAN customers can use to evaluate the performance of their vSAN systems. HCIBench is an automation wrapper around the popular and proven VDbench open source benchmark tool that makes it easier to automate testing across an HCI cluster. HCIBench, available as a fling, simplifies and accelerates customer performance testing in a consistent and controlled way.
Virtual machine (VM) provisioning operations such as create, clone, and relocate involve the placement of storage resources. Storage DRS (sometimes seen as “SDRS”) is the resource management component in vSphere responsible for optimal storage placement and load balancing recommendations in the datastore cluster.
A key contributor to VM provisioning times in Storage DRS-enabled environments is the time it takes (latency) to receive placement recommendations for the VM disks (VMDKs). This latency particularly comes into play when multiple VM provisioning requests are issued concurrently.
Several changes were made in vSphere 6.7 to improve the time to generate placement recommendations for provisioning operations. Specifically, the level of parallelism was improved for the case where there are no storage reservations for VMDKs. This resulted in significant improvements in recommendation times when there are concurrent provisioning requests.
vRealize automation suite users who use blueprints to deploy large numbers of VMs quickly will notice the improvement in provisioning times for the case when no reservations are used.
Several performance optimizations were further made inside key steps of processing the Storage DRS recommendations. This improved the time to generate recommendations, even for standalone provisioning requests with or without reservations.
vSphere 6.7 U1 includes several enhancements in Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM) to significantly reduce CPU use and generate a much faster response time for compliance checking operations.
SPBM is a framework that allows vSphere users to translate their workload’s storage requirements into rules called storage policies. Users can apply storage policies to virtual machines (VMs) and virtual machine disks (VMDKs) using the vSphere Client or through the VMware Storage Policy API’s rich set of managed objects and methods. One such managed object is PbmComplianceManager. One of its methods, PbmCheckCompliance, helps users determine whether or not the storage policy attached to their VM is being honored.
PbmCheckCompliance is automatically invoked soon after provisioning operations such as creating, cloning, and relocating a VM. It is also automatically triggered in the background once every 8 hours to help keep the compliance records up-to-date.
By Lan Vu, Uday Kurkure, and Hari Sivaraman
Data scientists may use GPUs on vSphere that are dedicated to use by one virtual machine only for their modeling work, if they need to. Certain heavier machine learning workloads may well require that dedicated approach. However, there are also many ML workloads and user types that do not use a dedicated GPU continuously to its maximum capacity. This presents an opportunity for shared use of a physical GPU by more than one virtual machine/user. This article explores the performance of a shared-GPU setup like this, supported by the NVIDIA GRID product on vSphere, and presents performance test results that show that sharing is a feasible approach. The other technical reasons for sharing a GPU among multiple VMs are also described here. The article also gives best practices for determining how the sharing of a GPU may be done.
VMware vSphere supports NVIDIA GRID technology for multiple types of workloads. This technology virtualizes GPUs via a mediated passthrough mechanism. Initially, NVIDIA GRID supported GPU virtualization for graphics workloads only. But, since the introduction of Pascal GPU, NVIDIA GRID has supported GPU virtualization for both graphics and CUDA/machine learning workloads. With this support, multiple VMs running GPU-accelerated workloads like machine learning/deep learning (ML/DL) based on TensorFlow, Keras, Caffe, Theano, Torch, and others can share a single GPU by using a vGPU provided by GRID. This brings benefits in multiple use cases that we discuss on this post.
A new paper describes the DRS enhancements in vSphere 6.7, which include new initial placement, host maintenance mode enhancements, DRS support for non-volatile memory (NVM), and enhanced resource pool reservations.
Resource pool and VM entitlements—old and new models
A summary of the improvements follows:
For more information about all of these updates, see DRS Enhancements in vSphere 6.7.
PerfPsychic our AI-based performance analyzing tool, enhances its accuracy rate from 21% to 91% with more data and training when debugging vSAN performance issues. What is better, PerfPsychic can continuously improve itself and the tuning procedure is automated. Let’s examine how we achieve this in the following sections.
Three elements have huge impacts on the training results for deep learning models: amount of high-quality training data, reasonably configured hyperparameters that are used to control the training process, and sufficient but acceptable training time. In the following examples, we use the same training and testing dataset as we presented in our previous blog.
We in VMware’s Performance team create and maintain various tools to help troubleshoot customer issues—of these, there is a new one that allows us to more quickly determine storage problems from vast log data using artificial intelligence. What used to take us days, now takes seconds. PerfPsychic analyzes storage system performance and finds performance bottlenecks using deep learning algorithms.
Let’s examine the benefit artificial intelligence (AI) models in PerfPsychic bring when we troubleshoot vSAN performance issues. It takes our trained AI module less than 1 second to analyze a vSAN log and to pinpoint performance bottlenecks at an accuracy rate of more than 91%. In contrast, when analyzed manually, an SR ticket on vSAN takes a seasoned performance engineer about one week to deescalate, while the durations range from 3 days to 14 days. Moreover, AI also wins over traditional analyzing algorithms by enhancing the accuracy rate from around 80% to more than 90%.
By Mark Ma
With the release of vSphere 6.7, VMware added iSER (iSCSI Extensions for RDMA) as a native supported storage protocol to ESXi. With iSER run over iSCSI, users can boost their vSphere performance just by replacing the regular NICs with RDMA-capable NICs. RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access) allows the transfer of memory from one computer to another. This is a direct transfer and minimizes CPU/kernel involvement. By bypassing the kernel, we get extremely high I/O bandwidth and low latency. (To use RDMA, you must have an HCA/Host Channel Adapter device on both the source and destination.) In this blog, we compare standard iSCSI performance vs. iSER performance to see how iSER can release the full potential of your iSCSI storage.