Tuesday, October 15. 2013
Pablo Roesch speaks exclusively about VMworld Europe's Hands on Labs by VMworldTV
VMworld TV welcomes you to VMworld Europe 2013
Saturday, October 12. 2013
SEsparse in VMware vSphere 5.5
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
Friday, October 11. 2013
VMware vCenter Operations Manager Training: Dashboard Badges & Capacity Settings
vCenter Operations Manager collects performance data from each object at every level of your virtual environment, from individual virtual machines and disk drives to entire clusters and data centers.
- It stores and analyzes the data, and uses that analysis to provide real-time information about problems, or potential problems, anywhere in your virtual environment. vCenter Operations Manager works with existing VMware products to add the following functions:
- Combines key metrics into single scores for environmental health and efficiency and capacity risk. Calculates the range of normal behavior for every metric and highlights abnormalities. Adjusts the dynamic thresholds as incoming data allows it to better define the normal values for a metric.
- Presents graphical representations of current and historical states of your entire virtual environment or selected parts of it.
- Displays information about changes in the hierarchy of your virtual environment. For example, when a virtual machine is moved to a different ESX host, you can see how these changes affect the performance of the objects involved.
- Allows you to define "group" containers to organize monitored objects in accordance with the structure of your environment.
Thursday, October 10. 2013
VMworldTV - VMware's IT Business Management Suite
VMware IT Business Management Suite provides transparency and control over IT costs, services and quality. By automating previously manual processes and providing a business orientation for IT, IT Business Management Suite provides the fact-based approach CIOs and IT executives need to run IT like a business. With IT Business Management Suite, IT gains ready access to the service, cost and quality information needed to minimize the cost of IT while maximizing competitive advantage.
- Transparency into IT services, costs and quality
- Fact-based decisions to optimize and align IT spending
- Reduce IT costs up to 15 percent or more
- Move away from IT as a cost center
- Run IT like a business aligning IT services and costs with demand for those services
Deploying Extremely Latency-Sensitive Applications in VMware vSphere 5.5
Performance demands of latency-sensitive applications have long been thought to be incompatible with virtualization. Such applications as distributed in-memory data management, stock trading, and high- performance computing (HPC) demand very low latency or jitter, typically of the order of up to tens of microseconds.
Although virtualization brings the benefits of simplifying IT management and saving costs, the benefits come with an inherent overhead due to abstracting physical hardware and resources and sharing them.
Virtualization overhead may incur increased processing time and its variability.
VMware vSphere ensures that this overhead induced by virtualization is minimized so that it is not noticeable for a wide range of applications including most business critical applications such as database systems, Web applications, and messaging systems.
vSphere also supports well applications with millisecond-level latency constraints such as VoIP streaming applications. However, certain applications that are extremely latency-sensitive would still be affected by the overhead due to strict latency requirements.
In order to support virtual machines with strict latency requirements, vSphere 5.5 introduces a new per-VM feature called Latency Sensitivity.
Among other optimizations, this feature allows virtual machines to exclusively own physical cores, thus avoiding overhead related to CPU scheduling and contention. Combined with a pass- through functionality, which bypasses the network virtualization layer, applications can achieve near-native performance in both response time and jitter.
Briefly, this paper presents the following:
- It explains major sources of latency increase due to virtualization, which are divided into two categories: 1) contention created by sharing resources and 2) overhead due to the extra layers of processing for virtualization.
- It presents details of the latency-sensitivity feature that improves performance in terms of both response time and jitter by eliminating the major sources of extra latency added by using virtualization.
- It presents evaluation results demonstrating that the latency-sensitivity feature combined with pass-through mechanisms considerably reduces both median response time and jitter compared to the default configuration, achieving near-native performance.
- It discusses the side effects of using the latency-sensitivity feature and presents best practices.