Joseph Dieckhans, Author at VMware vSphere Blog

Flash to the Rescue, Virtualizing Business Critical Applications in a Flash

Joseph Dieckhans posted April 17, 2014

There is no doubt that the barriers to virtualization have been rapidly falling. In fact today with VMware’s Monster VM capabilities and the scalability of vSphere 5.5, many organizations have recognized that practically any application can be virtualized and they have adopted a virtualization first policy. But there are still some customers that have been Read more...

Memory Performance Counters – An Evolved Look at Memory Management

Joseph Dieckhans posted October 5, 2012

vSphere memory management has evolved over the years taking advantage of new technologies and techniques like using large memory pages, compressing memory, and using solid state devices (SSDs) for swap caching. This evolution has changed the way we need to look at memory usage and memory over-commitment in vSphere virtualized environments. To understand memory management Read more...

The Best Keep Getting Better – VMware vSphere 5.1 Performance

Joseph Dieckhans posted August 27, 2012

Today, VMware’s CTO Steve Herrod, addressed the 20,000+ attendees at VMworld and announced that VMware has out done itself again by providing a virtualization platform more than capable of supporting even the most demanding and I/O intensive mission critical applications. One impressive performance study that Steve highlighted in his keynote was the 1 Million IOPS Read more...

Performance Sessions @ VMworld 2012 San Francisco

Joseph Dieckhans posted August 23, 2012

VMworld is just around the corner! Like always it is going to be an exciting action-packed week. If you are going to be at the show make sure you check out some of the VMware performance sessions being delivered. vSphere Performance New Features Overview (you never know there might be some new things 😉 ) Read more...

Troubleshooting Storage Performance in vSphere – Storage Queues

Joseph Dieckhans posted July 13, 2012

Storage Queues what are they and do I need to change them? We have all had to wait in a line or two in our life, whether it is the dreaded TSA checkpoint line at the airport or the equally dreaded DMV registration line, waiting in line is just a fact of life. This is Read more...

VMX Swap feature in vSphere 5.0

Joseph Dieckhans posted June 29, 2012

Something you might have missed…. A little known feature of vSphere 5.0 called VMX swap helps to reduce the memory footprint of the VMX process by up to 80%. The vSphere kernel has several internal processes, agents, and data structures that require physical memory. vSphere reserves physical memory on the host to assure that these Read more...

Troubleshooting Storage Performance in vSphere (Part 3) – SSD Performance

Joseph Dieckhans posted June 16, 2012

While presenting the storage performance talks, I frequently get asked about Solid State Device (SSD) performance in a virtualized environment. Well obviously, SSD’s or EFD’s (Enterprise Flash Disks) are great for performance especially if you have storage intensive workloads. As seen in the previous post in this series, SSDs can provide significantly more IOPs and significantly Read more...

Troubleshooting Storage Performance in vSphere – Part 2

Joseph Dieckhans posted June 6, 2012

Poor storage performance is generally the result of high I/O latency, but what can cause high storage performance and how to address it? There are a lot of things that can cause poor storage performance… – Under sized storage arrays/devices unable to provide the needed performance – I/O Stack Queue congestion – I/O Bandwidth saturation, Read more...

Troubleshooting Storage Performance in vSphere – Part 1 – The Basics

Joseph Dieckhans posted May 30, 2012

I frequently present at the various VMware User Group (VMUG) meetings, VMworld and partner conferences. If you have ever attended one of my talks, you will know it is like trying to drink from a fire hose, it is hard to cover everything in just a 45 min session. Therefore I will take the time Read more...

Tighter Integration between EMC VNX Storage and VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite Announced Today

Joseph Dieckhans posted May 21, 2012

Posted byJoseph DieckhansSr. Technical Marketing Manager This week I’m out at EMC World 2012, and wanted to let you know of an exciting new announcement that EMC has made. EMC announced this week that they will provide Advanced Storage Analytics for their VNX storage arrays using VMware’s vCenter Operations product. The tighter integration between storage Read more...

VMware vSphere Blog