VMware Performance Blogs

Scott Drummonds: vSphere 4.0, Hyper-Threading, and Terminal Services

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 22:23:28 +0000

I recently wrote a blog article detailing Hyper-Threading (HT) and its effect on vSphere. An astute reader pointed out, a recent update to Project VRC’s terminal services analysis suggests disappointment with HT on vSphere. We spent a lot of time looking at those results to understand why they…

Scott Drummonds: Using Perfmon For Accurate, ESX Performance Counters

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 23:57:48 +0000

My colleague in product management, Praveen Kannan, has been working to extend Perfmon to show some ESX performance counters. This capability is automatically installed with VMware Tools on vSphere 4. But Praveen and I have made a stand-alone version available to those of you that are still on…

VROOM! Performance Blog: SAP Three-Tier Shows Excellent Scaling on vSphere

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:44:00 +0000

There have been many tests published showing great performance of SAP software running on VMware vSphere in a two-tier configuration. Both the application server and database server are running on the same VM in a two-tier configuration which reflects how...

Scott Drummonds: Hyper-Threading on vSphere

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 18:05:38 +0000

I continue to receive many questions from our customers on the expected performance gains of the new version of Hyper-Threading in Intel’s Core i7 processors. The answer requires a little bit of discussion on Hyper-Threading, a little bit on ESX, and comes with some performance data. If you are…

VROOM! Performance Blog: Achieving High Web Throughput with VMware vSphere 4 on Intel Xeon 5500 series (Nehalem) servers

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 02:34:05 +0000

We just published a SPECweb2005 benchmark score of 62,296 -- the highest result published to date on a virtual configuration. This result was obtained on an HP ProLiant DL380 G6 server running VMware vSphere 4 and featuring Intel Xeon 5500...

Scott Drummonds: Maximum Concurrent VMotions

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:38:35 +0000

A VMware customer and attendee of a talk I gave at a performance roundtable asked me for a preview of unreleased features*. When I talked about the amazing improvements to VMotion that would enable as many as eight concurrent VMotions the customer said, and I am paraphrasing here, “Yawn. I can…

Scott Drummonds: Memory Compression

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:36:15 +0000

Steve Herrod’s keynote at Partner Exchange 2010 included a tantalizing slide on an upcoming memory maximization technology: memory compression. A few of you have already seen the overview of this technology Kit Colbert and Fei Guo previewed it at VMworld 2009. Today I want to tell you how…

Scott Drummonds: PVSCSI and vmxnet3

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:12:34 +0000

I heard a myth today that VMware did not support running vmxnet3 and PVSCSI in the same virtual machine. I have talked with a dozen engineers on the subject since it came up this morning and all swear the drivers run great together. The two drivers work on very different and unrelated stacks in…

Scott Drummonds: VMworld 2010 Performance Lab

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 05:21:10 +0000

As you can imagine, we VMware employees are starting to ramp up for VMworld 2010 and its younger brother in Copenhagen, VMworld Europe 2010. Last year I ran the performance lab and this year I plan on making it even more awesome than last year. Since this blog enjoys a small following of the…

VROOM! Performance Blog: High-Performance PVSCI Storage Adapter Can Reduce CPIO by 10%-30%

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 01:34:38 +0000

Paravirtualized SCSI (PVSCSI) is a high-performance storage adapter available in VMware vSphere 4. The PVSCSI adapter is best-suited for virtual machines that run applications which generate heavy I/O. The vSphere 4 performance study compares the performance of PVSCSI with LSI...

Scott Drummonds: Windows Guest Defragmentation

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 16:22:55 +0000

Today at VMware Partner Exchange I had a lunchtime discussion with a partner of ours that makes a Windows file system (NTFS) defragmentation tool. He related anecdotes of incredible performance acceleration credited to defragmentation and quoted a few numbers based on his test environment. When he…

Scott Drummonds: Las Vegas Taxi Rates

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 21:22:06 +0000

Let’s take a break from virtualization and talk about taxi cabs in Las Vegas. I just got into McCarran airport after a fantastically successful VMware Partner Exchange 2010 and want to ask some of you seasoned veterans of Las Vegas to share your thoughts on a cab problem that I only learned of…

Scott Drummonds: Inaccuracy of In-guest Performance Counters

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 23:33:43 +0000

Every couple of months I receive a request for an explanation as to why performance counters in a virtual machine cannot be trusted. While it is unfairly cynical to say that in-guest counters are never right, accurate capacity management and troubleshooting should rely on the counters provided by…

VROOM! Performance Blog: SAP Batch Job Performance on vSphere

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:44:57 +0000

An included part of every SAP system is the SGEN transaction that is used to recompile all the objects in the system after every system update. This job is run by SAP Basis administrators after a fresh install or upgrade...

Scott Drummonds: PVSCSI and Low IO Workloads

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:46:56 +0000

Scott Sauer recently asked me a tough question on Twitter. My roaming best practices talk includes the phrase “do not use PVSCSI for low-IO workloads”. When Scott saw a VMware KB echoing my recommendation, he asked the obvious question: “Why?” It took me a couple of days to get a…

Scott Drummonds: VMware Perfmon Counters Missing on vSphere?

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 04:37:09 +0000

I was recently shown a problem where the ESX Perfmon counters we added to vSphere 4.0 virtual machines were not appearing in Windows virtual machines as of vSphere 4.0 U1. The problem stems from an issue with mofcomp, which I will briefly describe below. For the impatient, the workaround is to…

VROOM! Performance Blog: VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.0 Performance and Best Practices White Paper Posted

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 10:12:09 +0000

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.0 is a component of VMware Infrastructure that ensures a speedy and successful datacenter recovery by automating the recovery process and eliminating the complexity of managing and testing recovery plans. A new white paper, VMware...

VROOM! Performance Blog: SAP Performance and Scalability with IBM System x3850 M2 and vSphere 4

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:49:17 +0000

Back in June, I wrote about some scale-up experiments that we conducted with SAP software on vSphere 4. That work focused on a single VM, so we decided to follow it up with a study of multiple VMs on a...

VROOM! Performance Blog: Performance Study of VMware vStorage Thin Provisioning

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:48:55 +0000

vStorage Thin Provisioning, a key component of VMware vSphere™, is a technology that redefines storage provisioning by allocating space on demand to the virtual disks. We recently published a paper that gives the details of this feature and discusses experiments...

VROOM! Performance Blog: Storage performance improvements in vSphere 4.0

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 23:17:59 +0000

We made a huge number of performance improvements in vSphere 4.0. The ESX storage stack was no exception. We ran a wide variety of micro and real world benchmarks to thoroughly evaluate and optimize vSphere’s storage subsystem. It is now...

VROOM! Performance Blog: Comparing Performance of 1vCPU Nehalem VM with 2vCPU Harpertown VM

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:09:00 +0000

vSphere has a new feature called Fault Tolerance that allows for a VM to be running in vLockstep on two physical servers at the same time. In the event of a failure of the primary VM, the secondary VM will...

VROOM! Performance Blog: Performance Troubleshooting for VMware vSphere 4 and ESX 4.0

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:59:29 +0000

Performance problems can arise in any computing environment. In a virtualized computing environment performance problems can arise due to new and often subtle interactions occurring in the shared infrastructure. Uncovering the causes of those problems requires an understanding of the...

Scott Drummonds: New Blog Home

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:20:31 +0000

I have moved my blog home to a new location. Come visit and read at vPivot.com.

Scott

Scott Drummonds: Love Your Balloon Driver

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:46:29 +0000

A couple of days ago we finally got out one of my favorite papers from our ongoing vSphere launch activities. This paper on ESX memory management, written by Fei Guo in performance engineering, has three graphs that are absolute gems. These graphs show balloon driver memory savings next to…

Scott Drummonds: Four Things You Should Know About ESX 4's Scheduler

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 19:24:18 +0000

I spent a great deal of time answering customers' questions about the scheduler. Never have so many questions been asked about such an abstruse component for which so little user influence is possible. But CPU scheduling is central to system performance, so VMware strives to provide as much…

Scott Drummonds: First Success of VMware's Performance Service Offering

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 19:00:43 +0000

Just over a week ago I had the privilege of riding along with VMware's Professional Services Organization as they piloted a possible performance offering. We are considering two possible services: one for performance troubleshooting and another for infrastructure optimization. During this trip we…

Scott Drummonds: Performance Debate at Burton Group's Catalyst 2009

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 17:52:01 +0000

Last week Chris Wolf moderated a debate on virtual platform performance between myself and Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix. A recording of the debate was put online shortly after its conclusion.

Simon and I disagreed on a few issues and demonstrated different strategies in the discussion. My goal in…

Hemant Gaidhani: Performance Enhancements in vSphere 4.0

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 05:41:30 +0000

Now that vSphere 4.0 is generally available, I have been getting several questions everyday about the performance enhancements in vSphere 4.0. So here's a list that tries to compile all VMware vSphere performance resources. Hopefully I have captured all that's available as of today - there's more…

Scott Drummonds: Tweaking vSphere Performance For High-Consolidation Workloads

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:13:21 +0000

I was recently copied on an internal thread discussing a performance tweak for VMware vSphere. The thread discussed gains that can be derived from an adjustment to the CPU scheduler. In ESX 3.5, ESX's cell construct limited vCPU mobility between different sockets. ESX 4.0 has no such limitations…

Scott Drummonds: My Hyper-V Video

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 20:47:09 +0000

There's been no shortage of comments on the Hyper-V video I posted. I made a comment on this action in a VMTN blog entry. Read up and comment here or there.

Scott

Bruce Herndon: Setting the Record Straight on the Hyper-V Video

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:19:50 +0000

Let me first introduce myself. I am Bruce Herndon and I manage one of the benchmarking teams at VMware. Our responsibilities include both VMmark and SPECvirt. Let me also state for the record that I am not exactly pleased to be writing on this particular subject in a public venue, but I really have…

Scott Drummonds: Drink From the Fire Hose

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 21:09:40 +0000

A few weeks ago our communities' administrators setup an XML aggregation of all blogs in VMware's performance community. In addition to the regular postings coming from VROOM! and me, there are several other members of our performance team that irregularly contribute new content. If you follow the…

Scott Drummonds: Newer Processors and Virtualization Performance

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:08:33 +0000

Newer processors are much more important to virtualization than physical, un-virtualized environments. The generational improvements haven't just increased the raw compute power, they've also reduced the overheads associated with virtualization. This blog entry will describe three key changes that…

Scott Drummonds: Final Thoughts on the Hyper-V Video

Sat, 16 May 2009 00:04:40 +0000

Its been about 10 days since I posted the YouTube video showing Hyper-V's stability problems in consolidated environments. I immediately received a lot of questions about the configuration that I answered to the best of my ability in my "Video on Hyper-V Crashes" blog entry. Many respondents were…

Scott Drummonds: Video on Hyper-V Crashes

Fri, 15 May 2009 16:14:18 +0000

Since I posted the YouTube video showing Hyper-V blue screens last Friday I've received a lot of comments, questions, compliments and complaints. The video and descriptive text have raised more questions than answers, so here are a few details to help fill out the story.

The workload was not…

Scott Drummonds: Virtualizing Microsoft SQL Server

Mon, 11 May 2009 20:41:38 +0000

At VMworld Europe 2009 my engineering colleague Chethan Kumar and I presented the results of a six-month investigation into the performance of SQL Server on ESX. Tomorrow (May 12 at 09:00 PDT) we're going to offer an updated version of this session to the general public. If you have any interest…

Hemant Gaidhani: Creating VM: P2V or not to?

Mon, 04 May 2009 18:28:28 +0000

Several VMworld presentations and best practice documents suggest that customers create fresh VMs, and do NOT convert an existing physical server to a VM (P2V), especially in case of Citrix XenApp/Presentation Server and Terminal Services. I frequently get asked why the rationale behind this -…

Scott Drummonds: The Role of the ESX Monitor

Wed, 29 Apr 2009 17:37:27 +0000

There's a lot of confusion out there on VMware's support for the CPU vendors' virtualization assist technology. VMware has always led the industry with its support for hardware assist. We were the first vendor to support AMD-v and Intel VT-x in 2006, the first to support AMD RVI in 2008, and will…

Scott Drummonds: Understanding ESX Memory Management at Partner Exchange 2009

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 16:15:15 +0000

I recently attended a practice talk for next week's Partner Exchange hosted by Kit Colbert, one of our senior engineers, who is leading a whole bunch of cool efforts around performance. I wanted to "leak" one slide that his showed us that we'll be touching up for publication. Some of you that are…

Hemant Gaidhani: VMware Communities Roundtable podcast: Virtualizing SQL Server

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 19:44:05 +0000

On April Fool's day, I did VMware Communities Roundtable podcast based on recent white paper, Microsoft SQL Server and VMware Virtual Infrastructure.

You can get streaming audio or download it here. It was a very good and interesting discussion around virtualizing MS SQL Server and am sure you…

Hemant Gaidhani: VMware Infrastructure and SQL Server: Best Practices white paper

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:06:20 +0000

Recently I published the Microsoft SQL Server and VMware Infrastructure best practices white paper.

What’s the purpose of this paper?

Microsoft SQL Server is a very popular and widely deployed general purpose database server supported on Windows Sever operating systems. As customers embrace a…

Jeff Buell: Virtualized TS/XenApp performance

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 02:20:24 +0000

We recently published a blog on VROOM! with our first results for XenApp performance on ESX, XenServer and native Windows 2003 (http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2009/01/virtualizing-xenapp-on-xenserver-50-and-esx-35-1.html). The reaction was quite strong to say the least, with a lot of…