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
May, 10 2010
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Storage IO Control
May 4th, 2010
May, 04 2010
Last year at VMworld 2009, Irfan Ahmad and Ajay Gulati presented a preview of an unreleased technology VMware is calling Storage IO Control (SIOC). SIOC is a feature aimed squarely at the number one cause of VMware performance problems: underperforming storage. Year after year I see misconfigured storage slowing virtualized applications with VMware blame for the problem. Now VMware hopes to add a new tool to our administrators’ toolboxes to help them identify and mitigate underperforming storage.