White Papers - Eric Sloof

Wednesday, March 25. 2015

VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 Performance Scalability and Best Practices

This white paper investigates how VMware Virtual SAN™ performs and scales for well understood synthetic workloads, Virtual SAN caching tier designs, and Virtual SAN configuration parameters. The goal is to provide guidelines on how to get the best performance for applications deployed on a Virtual SAN cluster.

Tests show that the Hybrid Virtual SAN Cluster performs extremely well when the working set is fully cached for random access workloads, and also for all sequential access workloads. The All-Flash Virtual SAN cluster, which performs well for random access workloads with large working sets, may be deployed in cases where the working set is too large to fit in a cache.

All workloads scale linearly in both types of Virtual SAN clusters—as more hosts are added and more disk groups per host, Virtual SAN sees a corresponding increase in its ability to handle larger workloads. Virtual SAN offers an excellent way to scale up the cluster as performance requirements

increase.

Friday, March 13. 2015

Ruby vSphere Console Command Reference for Virtual SAN 6

The Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) is an interactive command-line console user interface for VMware vSphere and Virtual Center. The Ruby vSphere Console is based on the popular RbVmomi Ruby interface to the vSphere API has been an open source project for the past 2-3 years.

RbVmomi was created with the goal to dramatically decrease the amount of coding required to perform routine tasks, as well as increase the efficiency of task execution, all while still allowing for the full power of the API when needed.

The Ruby vSphere Console comes bundled with both the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) and the Windows version of vCenter Server. RVC is quickly becoming one of the primary tools for managing and troubleshooting Virtual SAN environments.

This white paper is intended for vSphere architects, administrators, developers and any others who are interested in deploying, managing or maintaining a Virtual SAN infrastructure. To glean the most out of this document, it will help to be familiar with vSphere infrastructure, Virtual SAN hardware as well as VM provisioning workflows.

Wednesday, March 11. 2015

VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 Design and Sizing Guide

Although most Virtual SAN design and sizing exercises are straightforward, careful planning at the outset can avoid problems later. Based on observed experiences to date, the most frequent design issues are:

Failing to use VCG-listed components, drivers and firmware, resulting in unpredictable behavior. Flash devices and IO controllers are particularly sensitive.
Not properly sizing cache for capacity growth (e.g. thin volumes progressively getting fatter), resulting in declining performance over time.
Using 1Gb networking for performance-intensive environments, with predictably poor results.
Not understanding 3-node limitations associated with maintenance mode and protection after a failure.
Using very large, slow disks for capacity, resulting in poor performance if an application is not cache-friendly.
Failure to have sufficient extra capacity for operations.

This document focuses on the helping administrators to correctly design and size a Virtual SAN cluster, and answer some of the common questions around number of hosts, number of flash devices, number of magnetic disks, and detailed configuration questions to help to correctly and successfully deploy a Virtual SAN.

VMware vSphere 6 and Oracle Database Scalability Study

Many customers run their production Oracle databases within VMware vSphere® virtual machines to support critical and demanding applications. The performance of these Oracle databases can be key to the success of daily operations.

VMware conducted a series of tests to demonstrate the performance and scalability of large virtual machines on vSphere 6 running Oracle Database 12c. Using a transactional workload, it was found that a single large “Monster” virtual machine can efficiently use an entire current-generation four-socket server.

These results demonstrate that even very large and demanding Oracle database workloads can be successfully run with excellent performance with vSphere.

Monday, March 9. 2015

VMware Virtual SAN Diagnostics and Troubleshooting Reference Manual

VMware’s Virtual SAN is designed to be simple: simple to configure, and simple to operate. This simplicity masks a sophisticated and powerful storage product.

The purpose of this document is to fully illustrate how Virtual SAN works behind the scenes: whether this is needed in the context of problem solving, or just to more fully understand its inner workings.

Virtual SAN 6.0 comes with a Health Services plugin. This feature checks a range of different health aspects of Virtual SAN, and provides insight into the root cause of many potential Virtual SAN issues.

The recommendation when triaging Virtual SAN is to begin with the Virtual SAN Health Services. Once an issue is detected, the Health Services highlights the problem and directs administrators to the appropriate VMware knowledgebase article to begin problem solving.

Please refer to the Virtual SAN Health Services Guide for further details on how to get the Health Services components, how to install them and how to use the feature for troubleshooting common Virtual SAN issues.

Friday, March 6. 2015

Performance Evaluation of Network I/O Control in VMware vSphere 6

The Network I/O Control (NetIOC) feature in VMware vSphere® has been enhanced in vSphere 6.0 to support a number of exciting new features such as bandwidth reservations.

After tests demonstrate the performance utility of these new features, the performance impact of the new NetIOC algorithm is explored. Later tests show that NetIOC offers a powerful way to achieve network resource isolation at minimal cost, in terms of latency and CPU utilization.

Technical white paper: Performance Evaluation of Network I/O Control in VMware vSphere 6

(Page 1 of 22, totaling 127 entries)

Wednesday, March 25. 2015

Friday, March 13. 2015

Wednesday, March 11. 2015

Monday, March 9. 2015

Friday, March 6. 2015

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