Eric Sloof

The combination of View 5 and vSphere 5 deliver significant improvements in user experience and consolidation ratios, while at the same time delivering significant reductions in bandwidth consumption. This paper highlights how enhancements to View’s PCoIP lossless compression algorithm and support for client-side image caching in combination deliver up to 75% bandwidth reduction in both WAN and LAN conditions when compared with the previous release of View.

Further this paper illustrates how, across all network configurations, View 5 delivers improved user experience compared with other VDI solution, while consuming significantly less bandwidth and CPU resources than Microsoft RDP7 and comparable bandwidth to Citrix HDX.

Finally, while the View 5 PCoIP protocol dynamically adapts to changing network and CPU constraints, ensuring great experience out-of-the-box, this paper lists a number of environment variables and VDI best practices that ensure users can get the most out of their VDI environment.

VMware View 5 Performance and Best Practices

This white paper summarizes findings and recommends best practices to tune the different layers of an application’s environment for similar latency-sensitive workloads. By latency-sensitive, VMware means workloads that are looking at optimizing for a few microseconds to a few tens of microseconds end-to-end latencies; they don’t mean workloads in the hundreds of microseconds to tens of milliseconds end-to-end-latencies. In fact, many of the recommendations in this paper that can help with the microsecond level latency can actually end up hurting the performance of applications that are tolerant of higher latency.

- BIOS Settings
- NUMA
- Choice of Guest OS
- Physical NIC Settings
- Virtual NIC Settings
- VM Settings
- Polling Versus Interrupts
- Guest OS Tips and Tricks

VMware also has investigated the performance of two latency micro-benchmarks, one for Infiniband devices and another for networking devices, in VM DirectPath I/O (pass-through) mode, which bypasses most of the virtualization stack except the path for delivering interrupts from the underlying physical devices to the guest OS. Applying the recommendations reduced latency and therefore increased the score of these latency micro-benchmarks in a virtualized environment, bringing it closer to bare metal performance.

Best Practices for Performance Tuning of Latency-Sensitive Workloads in vSphere VMs

With VMware Data Recovery 2.0, VMware has extended the ability to quickly and simply protect and restore virtual machines. Fully integrated with VMware vCenter Server, VMware Data Recovery gives central management of backup and restore operations, and the inherent deduplication of data saves significant disk space and provides flexible options for storage. VMware Data Recovery 2.0 has introduced a number of improvements including performance enhancements, speed, and reliability improvements, as well as capabilities to enhance management with the ability to email reports and schedule maintenance windows.

Several fixes have been included that rectify issues found in VMware Data Recovery 1.2.1. Issues that have been resolved include:

• CIFS target handling and resilience
• Incremental RDM backup
• Backups failing with “not enough disk space” errors
• Backups failing with “disk full” error despite free space being available

Monday October 17th from 20:00-24:00 is your chance to meet up with peers before VMworld 2011 starts. This event is free for all attendees of VMworld and VMUG members. Please bring your VMworld badge or registration as a ticket. It’s not possible to pre-register for the event. VMUG DENMARK invites you to have free beer and soft drinks all night at one of the coolest places in Copenhagen.

See you all there - Cheers - http://www.vmugparty.com/

What happens during a front-end network outage? This video discusses and demonstrates what happens in a VMware vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) cluster during a front-end network outage.

What happens during a back-end network outage? This video discusses and demonstrates what happens in a VMware vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) cluster during a back-end network outage.