Eric Sloof

Bitdefender Security for Virtualized Environments (SVE) is the first all- encompassing security solution for virtualized datacenters, specifically architected for the dynamic datacenters of today. SVE protects any number of virtualized desktops and servers running on Windows and Linux systems. As opposed to traditional antimalware, Bitdefender centralizes all the scanning and update processes on a virtual appliance called Security Server, which helps deduplicate critical resources and diminish I/O activity on the physical host.

This video expands on the diagram provided in knowledge base article: "VMware vSphere 5 Memory Management and Monitoring diagram (2017642)". It provides a comprehensive look into the ESXi memory management mechanisms and reclamation methods, and also provides the relevant monitoring components in vCenter Server and the troubleshooting tools like ESXTOP.

More than 55% of the world's server systems are now virtualized, and 50-60% of today's critical business applications are built with Java. Information about optimizing virtualized systems running Java is critical – and it's remarkably scarce. Often, there's a mindshare gap” between VMware vSphere administrators and Java developers, who have fundamentally different knowledge and experience.

Now, the world's leading expert in Java enterprise virtualization bridges the gap between these fields, offering both the theory and practical solutions that vSphere and Java administrators need to optimize large-scale Java-based systems. Both a reference and a performance cookbook, Virtualizing and Tuning Large Scale Java Platforms will be indispensable to all technical professionals and IT managers responsible for Java performance in virtualized enterprise systems.

Emad Benajmin provides detailed case studies, specific technical advice, troubleshooting help, up-to-date FAQs, and much more. You'll learn how to correctly size, scale, and rationalize virtualized Java platforms; and tune VMware vSphere for the unique challenges of large Java applications.

Benjamin addresses crucial technical issues such as Java garbage collection, and helps you modernize Java application architecture using in-memory databases – preparing your applications for both Big Data and Fast Data. Whether you're virtualizing Websphere, Weblogic, Tomcat, or any other Java-based enterprise application platform, this guide will help you get all the performance, utilization, reliability, and manageability you're paying for.

Expected December 2013 -  Virtualizing and Tuning Large Scale Java Platforms

Acronis vmProtect 9 provides backup and replication of virtual machines and recovery of entire ESXi servers. It fully supports Microsoft Exchange Server, SQL Server, SharePoint, Active Directory and other applications.

You can easily extract individual items or files from Exchange or SharePoint backups. Fastest recovery for less downtime By running a virtual machine directly from a mounted image you gain near-instantaneous recovery, and the Acronis vmFlashBack technology recovers virtual machines 100 times faster than a full recovery.

Widest array of backup destinations Acronis vmProtect 9 provides backups to local disks, network shares, ESXi datastore, and the Cloud to optimize storage. Easy to install, use and manage You can install and configure Acronis vmProtect 9 in minutes, then manage backups directly from vCenter or a Web console using supported browsers.

Unlimited migrations Acronis vmProtect 9 allows you to perform unlimited migrations of physical or virtual servers to VMware vSphere®.

This free self paced eLearning course facilitates the avoidance of the pitfalls commonly encountered when experienced VMware vSphere professionals cross the chasm of Tier-1 SQL Server virtualization.

Storage is the single largest impediment for the penetration of virtualization within the enterprise data center. Existing network attached, shared storage is unable to keep up with the performance requirements of virtualization because of its antiquated design based on mechanical drives. However, these storage systems do a good job satisfying the capacity and data services requirements in the data center.

The advent of flash storage holds promise for satisfying the performance requirements provided it is used appropriately. Simply adding an all flash array inside a SAN is not the right answer because it is both operationally disruptive and simply moves the bottleneck to the network. PernixData believes the correct location for flash in the data center is on the server side. However, existing solutions for leveraging server-side flash are not enterprise class.

Instead they are caching solutions that satisfy niche use cases and cause operational disruption. Because of its scale out architecture and built-in clustering capabilities PernixData FVP is able to accelerate both read and write operations while guaranteeing no data loss. PernixData FVP supports clustered hypervisor features, such as VMware vMotion and DRS, transparently and without the need for special workflows or proprietary interfaces.

Finally, PernixData FVP embeds itself inside the hypervisor transparently and with zero disruption. This means enterprises can install PernixData FVP within minutes and reap immediate return on investments. As a result PernixData FVP is the first truly seamless and enterprise class, software-defined, scale-out Performance tier that leverages server-side flash for virtualized data centers.

pernixdata.com

The SEsparse virtual disk format was introduced in VMware vSphere® 5.1 for VMware® Horizon View environments where reclamation of storage space is critical because of the large number of tenants sharing storage. In vSphere 5.5, for VMDKs greater than 2TB in size, SEsparse becomes the default scheme for virtual disk snapshots.

Various enhancements were made to SEsparse technology in the vSphere 5.5 release, which makes SEsparse perform mostly on par or better than VMFSsparse formats. SEsparse also has a significant advantage over VMFSsparse virtual disk formats by being space efficient. We conducted a series of performance experiments, including a comprehensive set of Iometer workloads, real data-intensive applications like Hadoop MapReduce applications, and VDI workloads.

Overall, the performance of SEsparse is about 2x better than the VMFSsparse format for a random write workload and slightly better or on par with the VMFSsparse format for other workloads. One of the very few cases where VMFSsparse outperforms SEsparse is during sequential writes of very large block sizes like 512KB. The data generation part of the Hadoop TeraSort application issues large (512KB) sequential writes, so we have seen decreased performance in SEsparse for those cases. Improving the sequential write performance with large I/Os is being investigated.


For VDI environments, however, using the SEsparse virtual disk format increases the space efficiency of VDI desktops over time with no impact on user latencies. The space reclamation (wipe-shrink) operation in SEsparse has a 10% CPU overhead and should be scheduled during low server load. After the wipe-shrink operation completes, we observe slight improvements in user latency and CPU utilization. Overall, SEsparse is the recommended disk format for VDI workloads. 

Download this technical white paper: SEsparse in  VMware vSphere 5.5