5 Performance-Boosting vsphere Features You re Missing out on

Transcription

1 5 Performance-Boosting vsphere Features You re Missing out on

2 1 vshield Endpoint 2 Fine tuning High Availability Our Agenda Today. 3 4 VMware Converter Update Manager 5 Using Resource Pools Properly 6 Q & A Session info@altaro.com

3 The Presenters Ryan Birk Andy Syrewicze VMware Certified Instructor. vexpert Technical Evangelist, Altaro. Vmware vexpert, Cloud & Datacenter Management MVP 3

4 About Altaro Software Altaro is a fast-growing developer of user-friendly backup solutions for small and mid-market businesses. Virtual Backup trusted by 30,000+ Customers and 6,000+ Partners and MSPs worldwide. Flagship product: Altaro VM Backup altaro.com/vm-backup 4

5 vshield Endpoint 5

6 vshield Endpoint So what is it exactly? VMware vshield Endpoint lets you manage anti-virus and anti-malware policies for virtualized environments with the same management interfaces you use to secure physical infrastructure. Offloading AV processing to a secure virtual appliance supplied by a VMware partner. Partner integration for antivirus and antimalware solutions. VMware vshield Endpoint plugs consists of three components: Hardened secure virtual appliances, delivered by VMware partners Thin agent for virtual machines to offload security events (included in VMware Tools) A hypervisor module to enable communication between the first two components at the hypervisor layer. VMware vshield Endpoint is included as a vsphere feature in vsphere editions Essentials Plus and later. No separate license key is needed. What happens when vcloud Networking and Security is retired? NSX for vshield Endpoint allows management of vshield Endpoint from NSX Manager. Available to those who have already purchased vsphere with vshield Endpoint (Essential Plus and above). 6

7 Fine tuning High Availability 7

8 Fine tuning High Availability HA is not just a checkbox. HA should play a part in your business continuity plan, it is not the end all be all! Let s start by covering a few important things. Not every VM will need HA! Shared storage is incredibly important. Redundant management networks are incredibly important as well! ESXi hosts should have similar hardware specs. It s not required but will make your life easier! High Availability is a cluster setting. One of the hosts is elected as master. Heartbeats are sent through network and storage to communicate availability. Why redundancy is key! HA Network i.e. network used by HA agents Management network (or) VSAN network (if VSAN is enabled) 8

9 Fine tuning High Availability (2) Networking recommendations. Use a redundant HA network! Verify all cables are running to different switches, one flat network is a no-no! vlans work, but verify storage and management networks are separate and redundant. Disable Host Monitoring if you perform network maintenance. Reconfigure HA on cluster after network maintenance. Consistent port group names and network labels. Prod!= Production. You might know it s the same network, your host does not. Verify your MTU sizes are the same across hosts. Verify all security policies are the same across port groups. I also like to make sure all network adapters are the same configuration during host deployment. This also helps your vmotions go smoothly. You can use PowerCLI to automate the setup. o New-VirtualSwitch o New-VirtualPortGroup 9

10 Fine tuning High Availability (3) Storage recommendations. Keep your environment boring!! All hosts should see the same datastores. There should be no variance between hosts. If one host sees 6 datastores, the other hosts should see those same datastores. Heartbeat Datastores: Isolated from your management network. Resilient to failure. 10

11 Fine tuning High Availability (4) Admission Control recommendations. Admission Control guarantees that capacity is available for an HA failover. It is constantly monitoring host resources. Be aware when putting hosts in maintenance mode or removing hosts from a cluster. Admission control imposes constraints on resource usage. Any action that might violate these constraints is not permitted. Actions that might be disallowed include the following examples: Powering on a virtual machine Migrating a virtual machine Increasing the CPU or memory reservation of a virtual machine The basis for vsphere HA admission control is how many host failures your cluster is allowed to tolerate and still guarantee failover. The host failover capacity can be set in three ways: Cluster resource percentage Slot policy Dedicated failover hosts Be careful setting manual slot sizes! 11

12 VMware Converter 12

13 VMware Converter If you have any physicals left, this tool is for you. It s a free tool to move VMs. You can also convert VMs from other hypervisor platforms to VMware. Install it on the source system to simplify. You can run it remotely but it greatly reduces firewall issues, etc. Resize your disks at the destination! This is a great option to reclaim some of that space your users said they needed but didn t need. Remember your data will stay the same but you ll have different hardware. Do an ipconfig /all > c:\ipconfig.txt. Cache your credentials or have local admin credentials ready. It s always nice to not have to dig for this data! Remove any older vendor related software and install VMware Tools 13

14 Update Manager 14

15 Update Manager / Patching Keep your patching simple. One of the last things you should do is not patch! Update Manager is now bundled with the vcenter Linux Appliance (as of 6.5). No more separate Windows installation required. Upgrade paths should always start with vcenter first, followed by ESXi hosts and then VMs. Don t forget any vendor software you might need. Should you use the vanilla version or the version provided by your hardware vendor? Patch at the cluster level! That way, you are positive everything underneath the cluster is at the same baseline. Disable HA and other cluster features during the patch window. If you don t use Update Manager, you can patch using esxcli as well. (The below gets you to 6.5 U1) esxcli network firewall ruleset set -e true -r httpclient esxcli software profile update -p ESXi standard -d 15

16 Using Resource Pools Properly 16

17 Resource Pool Setup Not every VM needs a resource pool. Use resource settings like Reservations, Shares, and Limits only if needed in your environment!! Think of Resource Pools as temporary band-aids, not permanent fixes. My motto is the less resource pools, the better. It s easier to troubleshoot! To fully isolate a pool, make the resource pool Fixed and use a Reservation and a limit. Sometimes you really do just need more resources. Use resource pools to delegate resource management. Group virtual machines for a multi-tier service into a resource pool. This allows resources to be assigned for the service as a whole. 17

18 What is a limit? Can a limit save your runaway VMs? A limit is exactly what it sounds like, a limit. A hard cap. On memory the limit defines what is the maximum amount of physical memory the virtual machine can use. This is a very dangerous setting! On CPU the limit defines how much access a virtual cpu can get on a physical cpu. It is used to make sure a virtual machine is not using too much resources on a host. Limit pitfalls: If you set the limit lower than the configured memory for a VM it will cause swapping and balloon activity for the virtual machine. A VM cannot power on unless a reservation can be guaranteed. Limits on memory can have huge consequences. I always look for virtual machines with a limit on memory. By limiting the vcpu through an enforced limit, you limit the performance of the virtual machine. Even though capacity is available on the ESXi host, the limit will still be enforced. 18

19 What is a reservation? Do you need them for every VM? Not every VM needs a reservation. A reservation is a guarantee on either memory or cpu for a virtual machine. You define the reservation in MB or MHZ. A VM cannot power on unless a reservation can be guaranteed. A reservation is a minimum promise to that VM. Reservation pitfalls: A user has a performance problem with a VM that has 8GB of memory. You decide to assign a reservation to that VM for 8GB of memory. Is that a good idea? Maybe, maybe not. If the VM does not truly use 8GB, you re essentially throwing out those resources. No other VM can use them! How do you make sure production VMs perform better than Test VMs, that s important. Use share values. More on those in the next slides. 19

20 What are shares? Production vs. Test VMs! A share value is set either at the individual VM or inside a resource pool. With shares, I like to keep it simple. Use shares at the resource pool level and create Prod/Test pools. Shares are just a game of fractions. It s not a MHz, GHz, MB or GB. Add up the shares across the host, do the math. Prod Resource Pool = Shares 3000 Test Resource Pool = Shares 1000 In the above scenario: IF the host gets busy, the Prod pool will get essentially 75%. Test pool will get 25%. It forces the production stuff to be more important. 20

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25 LIVE Q&A! Your turn: Time to answer your questions! What questions do you have on today s topic? Type your questions in the Questions box in GoToWebinar Reminder Any questions we can t tackle today will be answered in an upcoming blog post on our Hyper-V blog: Want to be notified when that s published? Sign up for updates here: 25

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