vPivot

Scott Drummonds on Virtualization

KVM Performance

September 30th, 2009
Sep, 30 2009
9 Comments »

A few days ago someone forwarded me a blog article with an interesting claim about KVM performance:

Testing results from internal and customers showed SAP workloads: 85-95, Oracle OLTP: 80-92% bare metal. LAMP stack showed better than bare metal performance. Whitepapers will be published in how this was achieved. Java achieved up to 94% bare metal.

Frankly, I was surprised to hear this.  KVM is a hosted virtualization platform, equivalent to the free VMware Server, which runs on top of a host operating system.  VMware server is fine for a virtual machine or two, but you would not want it hosting your critical business applications.  The above KVM claim suggests that KVM possesses hypervisor-like performance.  So we ran a test with a few virtual machines to see what we could learn.  These tests confirmed my suspicions: KVM is a very long way from enterprise-class virtualization performance.

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Four Things You Should Know About ESX 4's Scheduler

September 29th, 2009
Sep, 29 2009
2 Comments »

[This is the last re-post of old community content.  But this content is important enough to be worth a re-post.]

I spend a great deal of time answering customers’ questions about the scheduler. Never have so many questions been asked about such an abstruse component for which so little user influence is possible. But CPU scheduling is central to system performance, so VMware strives to provide as much information on the subject as possible. In this blog entry, I want to point out a few nuggets of information on the CPU scheduler. These four bullets answer 95% of the questions I get asked.

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ESX Memory Management: Ballooning Rules

September 25th, 2009
Sep, 25 2009
4 Comments »

[Taken from my communities blog, this article shows you why you should "Love Your Balloon Driver".]

Earlier this month we finally published one of my favorite papers from ongoing vSphere launch activities. This paper on ESX memory management, written by Fei Guo of performance engineering, has three graphs that are absolute gems. They show balloon driver memory savings next to throughput numbers for three common benchmarks. The conclusion is inescapable: the balloon driver reclaims memory from over-provisioned VMs with virtually no impact to performance. This is true on every workload save one: Java.
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Micro-bursting and Storage Performance

September 23rd, 2009
Sep, 23 2009
5 Comments »

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.

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vSphere Performance Leadership with Terminal Services

September 21st, 2009
Sep, 21 2009
6 Comments »

Project VRC’s latest update (document available with registration) to their ongoing analysis of Terminal Services and XenApp performance in virtualized environments supports VMware’s claims of industry-leading performance.  There are two main conclusions of the revised version: (1) VMware outperforms XenServer and (2) previous performance measurements of XenServer were in error, reporting artificially high results on that product.

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Performance Troubleshooting: No PhD Required!

September 18th, 2009
Sep, 18 2009
No Comments »

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.

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vSphere Is Not the Performance Problem, Your Storage Is

September 18th, 2009
Sep, 18 2009
10 Comments »

[This is an update to one of my favorite articles, which details my on-site investigation of SQL Server performance problems.]

Back in July I had the privilege of riding along with VMware’s Professional Services Organization as they piloted a possible performance offering. We are considering two possible services: one for performance troubleshooting and another for infrastructure optimization. During this trip we piloted the troubleshooting service, focusing on the customer’s disappointing experience with SQL Server’s performance on vSphere.

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Using Perfmon For Accurate, ESX Performance Counters

September 17th, 2009
Sep, 17 2009
23 Comments »

[An update to an old community post with more information on the tool.]

My colleague in product management, Praveen Kannan, has been working to extend Perfmon to show some ESX performance counters. This capability is automatically installed with VMware Tools on vSphere 4. But Praveen and I have made a stand-alone version available to those of you that are still on VI3. Download it here to give it a try.  [See note below if that link is dead.]

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Newer Processors and Virtualization Performance

September 16th, 2009
Sep, 16 2009
4 Comments »

[New content has been added to this is an update to an old article from the performance community.]

Newer processors are much more important to virtualized environments than the non-virtualized counterpart. Generational improvements have not just increased the raw compute power, they have also reduced virtualization overheads. This blog entry will describe three key changes that have particularly impacted virtual performance.

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SQL Server Performance Problems Not Due to VMware

September 16th, 2009
Sep, 16 2009
4 Comments »

[First re-post of an old favorite.  This document is my most popular blog entry from the communities.]

Microsoft SQL Server runs at better than 80% of native on VI3 in most benchmarked environments. In production environments, and under loads that model those conditions, SQL Server runs at 90-95% of native on ESX 3.5. I can say this with confidence despite a large amount of the industry’s skepticism because I’ve spent so much time on SQL Server in the past half year. I’d like to share some of my research on the subject and observations with you.

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