My recent series of blog articles have discussed ESX memory management the the performance specter of host swapping. My last article attempts to correct the misconception that VMware recommends against over-commit memory. In that article I suggested that memory over-commit is requirement in optimizing memory utilization. Today I want to provide a specific example to show why this is true. I am have also included tips for identifying host swapping in your environments.
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January 6, 2010
Optimizing Memory Utilization
September 23, 2009
Micro-bursting and Storage Performance
I have been reading Chad Sakac’s article on IO queues and micro-bursting for months now. Chad is wicked technical for a manager type and after reading this post a dozen times I think I finally have it internalized. Let me put my own spin on this tome, embedded in which are several jewels of wisdom.
September 18, 2009
Performance Troubleshooting: No PhD Required!
A couple of weeks ago at VMworld in San Francisco I squeezed a few press meetings in between the 19 sessions of the performance lab I led. In one of those meetings I talked with David Vellante and two of his colleagues to discuss vSphere performance and performance monitoring. David and company asked some hard questions about our performance work but my knowledge of this area runs deep, so the conversation was fruitful and interesting.
A few days after the conference a coworker of mine shared the following quote with me, courtesy of an article by David on Internet Evolution:
The fact is, most data center managers wouldn’t trust VMware to manage their Tier 1 applications because if something goes wrong performance-wise, you still need to roll in the VMware PhDs to solve it.
Let me respond to a few of the suggestions from this quote.
