Comments on: VMworld 2010 Performance Lab

By: Dmitri Fedorov

Dmitri Fedorov — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:40:51 +0000

I could not get into any of the labs on VMworld 2009 because the only day I could get into them was the Developers Day on Monday, others were fully booked long time before.

I’d say NFS performance diagnosis is interesting as well as Storage IO Control.

By: Craig Risinger

Craig Risinger — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 20:47:36 +0000

I think many people would love being presented with several performance problems that they had to diagnose from esxtop and/or VC, and what are the key metrics to look for. These problems should include
- CPU starvation due to contention
- CPU starvation due to slow disk performance (VM A hogs the CPU waiting for disk IO while VM B accumulates Ready time, even though B has little disk demand)
- Poor performance while swapping in, but fine performance while much data sits in .vswp files

I have doubts about the benefits of managing swap file location for performance, since usually you either shouldn’t be swapping or maybe the swapping happens only during a bootstorm.

By: Lane Leverett

Lane Leverett — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 22:47:40 +0000

Hey Scott,
I’d have to agree with Tom, though I wasn’t in the Advanced Topics lab at PEX. Also NFS perf and troubleshooting is HUGE for me. NFS is my favorite protocol for use in my vSphere designs if possible. So the use of vscsiStats is also big on my list.

By: Sean W

Sean W — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:50:28 +0000

Hi,

I’d love to see a discussion/demonstration on tuning guest and host networking for low latency messaging workloads (vs., e.g., bulk throughput) — sort of a “how low can you go?” networking latency limbo…

Thanks,
Sean

By: Tom MacKay

Tom MacKay — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:14:00 +0000

Scott,
Having just worked the Advanced Topics Lab at PXE, we asked the attendees what they wanted to see in a Perf & TS lab, and the feedback was that they were very interested in TS and perf analysis focusing on Tier 1 Apps , deeper understanding of r/ESXTOP usage for same analysis (we promoted the upcoming Manage for Performance Course!), a break/fix portion of the lab, and vscsistats in ESXi (per your post) and NFS TS was a popular request. I thought the basic TS flow from the MfP class would be good to include as well…
Thanks!

By: Oli

Oli — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 11:43:52 +0000

esxtop and vscsistats are always good. Which counters are the main ones to keep an eye on and the threshold when to start worrying.

Other 3rd party tools that can be used to diagnose performance issues in the labs.

By: gguglie

gguglie — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:34:02 +0000

Hi,
Storage IO Control sound really interesting.

And.. btw… waiting to use all the starred feature on an hypervisor near me

Giuseppe

By: Winter

Winter — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 06:16:25 +0000

Hi!

Perhaps some thoughts on automated detection and remediation of issues? Recommendations on what *could* be automatically handled, and what should never be left to some decision making script for remediation?