vSphere

VMware has released a new technical paper regarding the performance of Multiple Java Applications in a VMware vSphere 4.1 Virtual Machine. This paper shows the results of tests that investigate the performance impact of running applications on multiple JVMs in a single virtual machine. These tests were conducted using the Olio application running in VMware vFabric tc Server 2.0 on VMware vSphere 4.1 Update 1. The intent of the investigation is to provide insight into the impact of sizing decisions when selecting the number of JVMs to deploy in a single VM.

Technical Paper - Performance of Multiple Java Applications in a VMware vSphere 4.1 Virtual Machine

This week was awesome and it isn’t even over yet. We had two new product launches and can expect some more fireworks in the coming days. Last Tuesday VMware has released vCenter Operations Standard, it’s a great new product which enables you to diagnose and analyse vSphere performance metrics. I’ve already blogged about it and also recorded a short demo video immediately after the release. VMware's Kit Colbert, lead engineer on vCenter Operations also recorded two great videos which will give you an in-depth overview of the vCenter Operations Standard edition and will learn you all about to the Troubleshooting Workflow.

VMware has released a great new product which is able to diagnose and analyse vSphere performance metrics. vCenter Operations Standard is for vCenter administrators who want to better understand the performance of their virtual infrastructure, and to diagnose and correct performance problems easily and quickly.

vCenter Operations Standard collects performance data from each object at every level of your virtual infrastructure, from individual virtual machines and disk drives to entire clusters and datacenters. It stores and analyses the data, and uses that analysis to provide you with real-time information about problems, or potential problems, in your enterprise. vCenter Operations Standard presents the data in graphical interface pages that display different views of your virtual infrastructure.

 vCenter Operations Standard adds several benefits to your suite of VMware tools

• vCenter Operations Standard combines key metrics into single scores for CPU, memory, disk, and contention performance.
• vCenter Operations Standard calculates the range of normal behavior for every metric and highlights abnormalities.
• With vCenter Operations Standard, you can view graphical representations of current and historical states of your entire virtual infrastructure or selected parts of it.
• vCenter Operations Standard displays information about changes in the hierarchy of your virtual infrastructure and shows how these changes affect the performance of the objects involved. For example, how moving a virtual machine from one ESX host to another ESX host affects the performance of the two ESX hosts and all other related objects.

VMware has released two technical whitepapers regarding storage I/O control.

Storage I/O Control Technical Overview and Considerations for Deployment

Storage I/O Control (SIOC) provides storage I/O performance isolation for virtual machines, thus enabling VMware® vSphere (“vSphere”) administrators to comfortably run important workloads in a highly consolidated virtualized storage environment. It protects all virtual machines from undue negative performance impact due to misbehaving I/O-heavy virtual machines, often known as the “noisy neighbour” problem. Furthermore, the service level of critical virtual machines can be protected by SIOC by giving them preferential I/O resource allocation during periods of congestion. SIOC achieves these benefits by extending the constructs of shares and limits, used extensively for CPU and memory, to manage the allocation of storage I/O resources. SIOC improves upon the previous host-level I/O scheduler by detecting and responding to congestion occurring at the array, and enforcing share-based allocation of I/O resources across all virtual machines and hosts accessing a datastore. With SIOC, vSphere administrators can mitigate the performance loss of critical workloads due to high congestion and storage latency during peak load periods. The use of SIOC will produce better and more predictable performance behavior for workloads during periods of congestion. Benefits of leveraging SIOC:

• Provides performance protection by enforcing proportional fairness of access to shared storage
  
• Detects and manages bottlenecks at the array
  
• Maximizes your storage investments by enabling higher levels of virtual-machine consolidation across your shared Datastores

The purpose of this paper is to explain the basic mechanics of how SIOC, a new feature in vSphere 4.1, works and to discuss considerations for deploying it in your VMware virtualized environments.

Managing Performance Variance of Applications Using Storage I/O Control

Application performance can be impacted when servers contend for I/O resources in a shared storage environment. There is a crucial need for isolating the performance of critical applications from other, less critical workloads by appropriately prioritizing access to shared I/O resources. Storage I/O Control (SIOC), a new feature offered in VMware vSphere 4.1, provides a dynamic control mechanism for managing I/O resources across VMs in a cluster. The experiments conducted in VMware performance labs show that:

• SIOC prioritizes VMs’ access to shared I/O resources based on disk shares assigned to them. During the periods of I/O congestion, VMs are allowed to use only a fraction of the shared I/O resources in proportion to their relative priority, which is determined by the disk shares.
  
• If the VMs do not fully utilize their portion of the allocated I/O resources on a shared datastore, SIOC redistributes the unutilized resources to those VMs that need them in proportion to VMs’ disk shares. This results in a fair allocation of storage resources without any loss in their utilization.
  
• SIOC minimizes the fluctuations in performance of a critical workload during periods of I/O congestion. For the test cases executed at VMware labs, limiting the fluctuations to a small range resulted in as much as a 26% performance benefit compared to that in an unmanaged scenario.
  

Performance problems can arise in any computing environment. Complex application behaviors, changing demands, and shared infrastructure can lead to problems arising in previously stable environments. Troubleshooting performance problems requires an understanding of the interactions between the software and hardware components of a computing environment. Moving to a virtualized computing environment adds new software layers and new types of interactions that must be considered when troubleshooting performance problems.  

The troubleshooting guide covers performance troubleshooting in a vSphere environment. It uses a guided approach to lead the reader through the observable manifestations of complex hardware/software interactions in order to identify specific performance problems. For each problem covered, it includes a discussion of the possible root-causes and solutions.

In particular, the troubleshooting guide covers performance troubleshooting on a VMware vSphere 4.1 host. It focuses on the most common performance problems which affect an ESX host. Future updates will add more detailed performance information, including troubleshooting information for more advanced problems and multi-host vSphere deployments.

http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2011/02/perf-troubleshooting-41.html

VMware offers world-class Desktop certifications designed to validate and recognize individuals with the technical capabilities and real-world experience needed to increase efficiency, reliability, and availability when delivering desktops from the datacenter as a managed service.

The VMware Certified Associate 4 – Desktop (VCA4-DT) is the first step toward gaining expertise in desktop virtualization and earning the respect and recognition that comes with being VMware Certified. The exam is designed for Desktop System Administrators who seek to demonstrate their ability to manage, monitor and troubleshoot desktop deployments and VMware View components, as well as their knowledge of adjacent, complementary technologies to VMware solutions.

http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/plan.cfm?plan=19733&ui=www_cert via William Lam

This paper provides best practice guidelines for deploying SAP® software solutions on VMware
vSphere 4. These guidelines only provide general recommendations and do not target any specific size or type of SAP solution implementation.

VMware has created separate best practice documents for the individual areas of storage, networking and performance. (See the Resources section for a list of these publications.) SAP also has created a variety of technical notes, published in the SAP Marketplace, for more information about virtualizing SAP solutions on VMware virtual infrastructure. Reference numbers of these notes are identified in this document, and you can refer to these additional technical notes in conjunction with the information provided here.

http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10086

This article is written by Ernst Cozijnsen.

A few days back after applying some patches via "Update Manager" we came to notice that our ESXi 4.1 host bacame unresponsive after a reboot. Loggin into the command prompt via ILO was unsuccessful too because the rootpassword was not working anymore. That just sucks!.... but nothing to get all emotional about since is just linux (well a sort of...)

Looking for a nice how-to explaining this i stumbled across the following article: http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/Reset_root_password.php

After doing the endless tar commands described in the article I rebooted the machines and what the ....... still not working. (And this is where I got frustrated since this is the only decent way to reset a security feature like this).

VMware states that it is impossible to reset a root password of an ESXi server in a supported way. Well.... let's see if we can bend that opinion. 
Since VMware was so nice to give us "host profiling"  I thought this was the time to look into it and see if we can use it in an alternative way. Chaning a root password without root permissions would normally be a serious security leak. OK, so the assumption is that the host you are having issues with was connected to vCenter and the account you are using has admin rights.

Execute teh following steps:

- Take a "similair" server and create a host profile from this machine
- Edit the Host profile and change the "Administrator password"  to a fixed one

Just before Christmas VMware has released two new technical papers. The first one goes in-depth on best practices for running Allscripts Emergency Department (ED) on VMware vSphere. The seconds one is about configuration examples and troubleshooting for VMDirectPath.

Deployment Guide: Best Practices for Running Allscripts Emergency Department (ED) on VMware vSphere

This document provides direction to those interested in running Allscripts Emergency Department (ED) on VMware vSphere™ 4. It provides basic guidance on the architecture of Allscripts Emergency Department as well as the value of utilizing the VMware platform. The results of recent testing done jointly by VMware and Allscripts are covered, where the performance and functionality of Allscripts ED on VMware virtual infrastructure are characterized. Finally, some best practices for utilizing the two product sets together in your datacenter are outlined.

Configuration Examples and Troubleshooting for VMDirectPath

VMDirectPath supports a direct device connection for virtual machines running on Intel Xeon 5500 systems, which feature an implementation of the I/O memory management unit (IOMMU) called Virtual Technology for Directed I/O (VT‐d). VMDirectPath can work on AMD platforms with I/O Virtualization Technology (AMD IOMMU), but this configuration is offered as experimental support. Some machines might not have this technology enabled in the BIOS by default. Refer to your hardware documentation to learn how to enable this technology in the BIOS.

VMware has released the "Enterprise Java Applications on VMware - Best Practices Guide". This paper discusses best practices for running Enterprise Java Applications on VMware vSphere virtual machines. The guidelines will help you to get the best from your Java applications and application servers when you run them on VMware vSphere.

http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/1087

This Enterprise Java Applications on VMware Best Practices Guide provides information about best practices for deploying enterprise Java applications on VMware, including key best practice considerations for architecture, performance, design and sizing, and high availability. This information is intended to help IT Architects successfully deploy and run Java environments on VMware vSphere.

Android-x86 is a project to port Android open source to the x86 platform, formerly known as "patch hosting for android x86 support". In this video I’ll show you how to create a VMware vSphere virtual machine configured with the Android-x86 boot CD.

Sorry for my rude title Scott but I was just on the phone with me ex Capgemini colleague Ernst Cozijnsen and we had a long discussion about super fast storage for replicas in a View environment. In the end we settled for RAM. I immediately jumped into my lab to setup a proof of concept to see how it performs and it’s pure awesomeness, faster than fast and quicker than quick. You want to see what we discussed? Well here’s the story. In the proof of concept I’m using a Windows 2008 64 bit Enterprise server with 7 GB of RAM and the StarWind iSCSI target software. I’ve configured this iSCSI target with a RAM disk of 6 GB and created a VMFS on the iSCSI target. I’ve cloned a Windows 2003 virtual machine to the newly created VMFS hosted in RAM and did some performance checks. I was astounded.

This paper describes best practices and guidance for properly deploying VMware HA in VMware vSphere 4.1.  These include discussions on proper network and storage design, and recommendations on settings for host isolation response and admission control.

http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10166

Finally, with Transparent Memory Compression, 4.1 will compress memory on the fly to increase the amount of memory that appears to be available to a given VM. The new Transparent Memory Compression is of interest in the workload cases where memory -- rather than CPU cycles -- has limitations. ESX/ESXi provides a Memory Compression cache to improve virtual machine performance when using memory over-commitment. Memory Compression is enabled by default when a host's memory becomes overcommitted; ESX/ESXi compresses virtual pages and stores them in memory.  

Since accessing compressed memory is faster than accessing memory swapped to disk, Memory Compression in ESX/ESXi allows memory over-commits without significantly hindering performance. When a virtual page needs to be swapped, ESX/ESXi first attempts to compress the page. Pages that can be compressed to 2 KB or smaller are stored in the virtual machine's compression cache, increasing the capacity of the host. The maximum size can be set for the Compression Cache and disable Memory Compression using the Advanced Settings dialog box in the vSphere Client.