I have struggled for years to give VMware’s customers a framework for diagnosing performance problems. People want a simple system to troubleshoot the unknown sources of poorly performing applications. The best attempt at documenting such a flow is Hal Rosenberg’s document on vSphere performance troubleshooting. Elegant as it may be, Hal’s document remains complex for the novice VI administrator. And it is because that document is so complex that performance people maintain their job security. 
But in an effort to further obviate my own job, I will try and generalize the troubleshooting flow to add more clarity to the process.
Performance Troubleshooting Made Simple
May 10th, 2010 Posted in Uncategorized
May, 10 2010
3 Comments »
How Many Virtual CPUs Per VM?
April 30th, 2010 Posted in Uncategorized
Apr, 30 2010
Virtual machine sizing is a tricky issue for many VMware administrators. It is important to find the right number of virtual CPUs to maximize application performance and minimize wasted CPU cycles. The optimal number of vCPUs can never be easily identified. But I can offer a few suggestions to help get this number right.
Optimizing Memory Utilization
January 6th, 2010 Posted in Uncategorized
Jan, 06 2010
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
Micro-bursting and Storage Performance
September 23rd, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized
Sep, 23 2009
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.
Performance Troubleshooting: No PhD Required!
September 18th, 2009 Posted in Uncategorized
Sep, 18 2009
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
Blog WebMastered by All in One Webmaster.
