VMWARE TUNING BEST PRACTICES FOR SANS, SERVER, AND NETWORKS

Transcription

1 VMWARE TUNING BEST PRACTICES FOR SANS, SERVER, AND NETWORKS Presenters: Luke Clutter, ITEC Dennis Aharanwa, ITEC

2 Agenda ESX and Virtual Machine containers Guest Operating Systems Virtual Infrastructure Management

3 General CPU Memory Storage Network

4 General Verify hardware is on the HCL h.php Disconnect/disable unused hardware in BIOS: COM, LPT, USB, Floppy etc. Enable BIOS features CPU features: hyperthreading, VT-x/AMD-V Memory features: EPT/RVI Test system memory for 72 hours or more

5 CPU Hyperthreading aware, but watch: Processor affinity/pinning Scheduling: Any (default), None, Internal None disables other virtual CPU Internal can use virtual CPU s, but not shared with different virtual machines NUMA Balance Nodes, or interleave VT-x (ESX3.0), AMD-V (ESX3.5) BT or HV may be used if no VMM support (ESX4.0) Based on CPU model and guest OS, can be hard coded

6 Memory Overhead COS, VMkernel, per VM (frame buffers) Overcommit Page sharing, Ballooning, Swapping Large Memory Pages 2MB instead of 4KB Hardware-Assisted MMU Intel EPT, AMD RVI

7 Storage Virtual disk modes: Independent persistent, Independent non-persistent, and snapshot Virtual disk types: Thick (eager-zeroed or lazy-zeroed) and Thin Boundaries/Alignment 64KB boundary is automatic if using vsphere Client to create the VMFS MRU vs. Fixed Path vs. Round Robin (ESX4.0) vs. MEM (ESX4.1) Queue depth (QUED) in esxtop

8 Network CPU usage for network traffic, even with hardware offloading Separate switches with physical nics for: COS, VMkernel and VMs Auto-negotiation vs. hardcoding speed/duplex Gigabit Ethernet uses all four twisted pairs VMs connected to the same vswitch memory transfer network data

9 General CPU Storage Network

10 General VMware Tools Windows has optimized BusLogic SCSI driver Includes balloon driver for memory over commitment Disable screen savers, window animations etc. Schedule backups, anti-virus scans, file integrity checks etc. for off hours, and stagger where possible Virtual Machine Interface (VMI), Paravirtualized OS Direct communication from guest OS with hypervisor CPU and Memory controller enhancements winner

11 CPU Use UP not SMP where possible RHEL5.1 and later, add divider=10 to kernel boot line Patch for RHEL5.1 x86_64, fixed in 5.2 and later Linux tickless-timer Less interrupts, better host performance

12 Storage Adds support for paravirtualized SCSI (PVSCSI) device as improvement to LSILogic and BusLogic drivers Queue depth Large I/O block sizes Partition alignment within guest

13 Network Good PCnet32 (vlance, flexible), E1000 Better VMXNET (ESX3.0) and Enhanced VMXNET (ESX3.5) Jumbo frame support (enhanced only) Best VMXNET3 (ESX4.0), requires virtual hardware version 7 Jumbo frame support TSO support If VMXNET is not supported by guest, use flexible nic

14 General Virtual Center DRS DPM FT

15 General Use Shares, not Reservations if available resources are expected to change frequently Keeps all VMs equally accessible to resources Only set Reservations to the minimum required If Reservations are too high, may limit the number of VMs that can even be powered on with reserved, but not used, resources available

16 Virtual Center Disconnect vsphere clients when not in use to save resources Avoid overly-aggressive alarm settings Run Update Manager and/or Converter on a separate system(s) if there is resource or database contention Periodically re-index the database Storage VMotion uses significant storage bandwidth

17 DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) Watch for incompatible hosts in the same cluster VLANs, snapshots, connected media, Reservations Power off/suspend unused VMs Disk I/O is not a factor in DRS balancing Keep resource pools and VMs at the same tiers in a hierarchy, not as siblings Don t want an entire pool with the same shares as a VM

18 DPM (Distributed Power Management) The more hosts in a cluster, the better Can mix ESX3.5 and ESX4, but need to meet vmotion requirements If a host does not support WOL, or has a reason to not shutdown, you can set behavior manually HA requirements are maintained so size clusters accordingly

19 FT (Fault Tolerance) Double resource utilization (cpu and memory) as both systems are powered up, size accordingly MMU and some other optimizations need to be disabled for FT, so there may be a performance hit Additional network requirements for logging (vlockstep) and failover, so plan bandwidth May need to modify cpu reservations etc. if the lockstep interval is unacceptable due to lag on the secondary node to prevent the primay from being slowed down

20 The End? Questions?