Vsphere High Performance Cookbook

A cookbook is the ideal way to learn a tool as complex as vSphere. Through experiencing the real-world recipes in this tutorial you'll gain deep insight into vSphere's unique attributes and reach a high level of proficiency.

Overview

• Troubleshoot real-world vSphere performance issues and identify their root causes
• Design and configure CPU, memory, networking, and storage for better and more reliable performance
• Comprehensive coverage of performance issues and solutions including vCenter Server design and virtual machine and application tuning

In Detail

VMware vSphere is the key virtualization technology in today’s market. vSphere is a complex tool and incorrect design and deployment can create performance-related problems. vSphere High Performance Cookbook is focused on solving those problems as well as providing best practices and performance-enhancing techniques.

vSphere High Performance Cookbook offers a comprehensive understanding of the different components of vSphere and the interaction of these components with the physical layer which includes the CPU, memory, network, and storage. If you want to improve or troubleshoot vSphere performance then this book is for you!

vSphere High Performance Cookbook will teach you how to tune and grow a VMware vSphere 5 infrastructure. This book focuses on tuning, optimizing, and scaling the infrastructure using the vSphere Client graphical user interface. This book will enable the reader with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to build and run a high-performing VMware vSphere virtual infrastructure.

You will learn how to configure and manage ESXi CPU, memory, networking, and storage for sophisticated, enterprise-scale environments. You will also learn how to manage changes to the vSphere environment and optimize the performance of all vSphere components.

This book also focuses on high value and often overlooked performance-related topics such as NUMA Aware CPU Scheduler, VMM Scheduler, Core Sharing, the Virtual Memory Reclamation technique, Checksum offloading, VM DirectPath I/O, queuing on storage array, command queuing, vCenter Server design, and virtual machine and application tuning.

By the end of this book you will be able to identify, diagnose, and troubleshoot operational faults and critical performance issues in vSphere.

What you will learn from this book

• Understand VMM Scheduler, Cache aware CPU Scheduler, NUMA Aware CPU Scheduler, and so on during CPU Performance Design
• Learn about the virtual memory reclamation technique, monitoring host ballooning, and swapping activity
• Get to grips with different vSwitch load balancing, considerations for checksum offloading, VMDirectPath I/O, and so on
• Understand DRS algorithms, resource pool guidelines, SIOC threshold consideration, SDRS and its affinity/anti-affinity rules in DRS, SDRS, and resource control design
• Scale up and scale out cluster design for performance, FT and its caveats, application monitoring, DPM, host affinity/anti-affinity rules
• Design your vSphere storage based on various workloads and FC storage for best performance
• Choose the right platform while designing your vCenter Server, redundant vCenter design, vCenter SSO and its deployment

Approach

vSphere High Performance Cookbook is written in a practical, helpful style with numerous recipes focusing on answering and providing solutions to common, and not-so common, performance issues and problems.

Prasenjit Sarkar

Prasenjit Sarkar (@stretchcloud) is a senior member of technical staff in VMware Service Provider Cloud R&D where he provides architectural and technical guidance to design, implement, and test VMware's Cloud datacenters.

He is an author and a blogger focusing on virtualization, cloud computing, storage, networking, and other enterprise technologies.

He has more than 10 years of expert knowledge in R&D, professional services, alliances, solution engineering, consulting, and technical sales, with expertise in architecting and deploying virtualization solutions and rolling out new technology and solution initiatives.

His primary focus is on the VMware vSphere infrastructure and the public cloud using VMware vCloud Suite.

One of his other focuses is to own the entire life cycle of a VMware-based IaaS (SDDC), especially vSphere, vCloud Director, vShield Manager, and vCenter Operations.

He was one of the VMware vExperts in 2012 and is well known for his acclaimed virtualization blog http://stretch-cloud.info.

Prasenjit holds certifications from VMware, Cisco, Citrix, RedHat, Microsoft, IBM, HP, and Exin.

Prior to joining VMware, he served other fine organizations such as Capgemini, HP, and GE as a solution architect and infrastructure architect.