Virtualization for Tier-1 Applications with VMware vSphere Presented by: Rick Scherer, VCP-vExpert

Todays Agenda Speaker Bio Whats New in VMware vSphere 4.0 – Name Changes – New Packages – New Features and Enhancements Building a Robust Virtual Environment – Focusing on the Four Fundamentals CPU – Memory – Disk – Network

Speaker Bio Worked in IT for 12 years Systems Administrator for 10 years UNIX Administration (Solaris, AIX, Linux) Windows Administration (Windows NT ) Network Design and Admin. (Cisco Catalyst, Nexus and MDS) Programming (Perl, Shell, PHP, HTML, PowerShell) Worked with VMware products for Over 6 Years Workstation 3.0, VMware GSX, ESX 2.0 VMware VCP since 2006 VMware vExpert in 2009 Took VMware VCDX Design Exam April 2 nd Technical Editor of Mastering VMware vSphere 4.0 Book Founder of VMwareTips.com

WHATS NEW IN VSPHERE 4.0

VMware Name Changes Old NameNew Name VMware InfrastructureVMware vSphere VMFSVMware vStorage VMFS VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB)VMware vStorage APIs for Data Protection VMware VirtualCenterVMware vCenter VMware Update ManagerVMware vCenter Update Manager VMware Capacity ManagerVmware vCenter CapacityIQ VMware ConverterVMware vCenter Converter (integrated) VMware vCenter Converter Standalone VMware Lifecycle ManagerVMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager VMware Lab ManagerVMware vCenter Lab Manager VMware Stage ManagerVMware vCenter Stage Manager VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM)VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager VMware VI ToolkitVMware vSphere PowerCLI VADKVMware Studio

VMware vSphere 4.0 Packaging STANDARD ($795 / CPU) Simple Consolidation ENTERPRISE PLUS ($3495 / CPU) Simplified Operations ADVANCED ($2245 / CPU) Availability ESSENTIALS PLUS Integrated availability solution for Small Businesses ($2995 All-in-One for 3 Servers) ESSENTIALS Basic management of free ESXi ($995 All-in-One for 3 Servers) Scale limited, Low initial price, Small office- oriented features Scale unlimited, Value price, Low TCO Full featured Basic management for: Simple consolidation Remote offices Test labs High availability for: Production infrastructure Mission critical applications Large scale management and integration for: Internal cloud Tier 1 applications ENTERPRISE ($2875 / CPU) Automated Resource Management Automated resource management for: Production infrastructure Mission critical applications

VMware vSphere 4.0 Packaging

New Features in vSphere 4.0 VMware VMDirectPath – Technology that enables Virtual Machines to directly access underlying hardware devices. VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch – Abstracts the configuration of Virtual Networking from the Host Level to the Datacenter Level VMware vNetwork Third Party Switch – APIs to allow Third Party network companies to create externally managed Virtual Switches, example: Cisco Nexus 1000V VMware vStorage Thin Provisioning – Thin Provisioning Functionality for VMDKs

More New Features in vSphere 4.0 VMware Fault Tolerance – Zero Downtime, continuous availability of Virtual Machines, made possible by VMware vLockstep. Hot Add & Hot Plug – The ability to hot add or remove CPU, Memory, Virtual Storage or Networking devices in a running Virtual Machine. VMware Data Recovery – Disk-based backup and recovery of your Virtual Machines, file and image level full and incremental backups. Recover an entire VM image or recover individual files and directories. (Not an upgrade for VCB)

More New Features in vSphere 4.0 vShield Zones – Virtual Appliance that provides a dynamic firewall capability for applications as they move around a DRS cluster. vApp – Functionality that enables the construction of a multi- VM entity and encapsulates information about the relationship between VMs and their service level requirements in OVF. vStorage APIs – Storage Vendor Integration with vSphere, enables offloading of storage tasks.

More New Features in vSphere 4.0 VMware vCenter Linked Mode – New capability in vCenter Server that allows multiple VCs to share roles, permissions and licensing information. The true gateway to Cloud Computing. VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat – Provides Continuous Availability for vCenter Server. VMware vCenter Chargeback (Late 2009) – Chargeback mechanism built into vSphere Client VMware vCenter AppSpeed (Late 2009) – Formally B-Hive Conductor, end to end application monitoring to ensure application performance SLAs.

Performance Enhancements in VMware ESX 4.0 VMware ESX 3.5VMware ESX 4.0 vCPU per Virtual Machine48 RAM per Virtual Machine64GB255GB NICs per Virtual Machine410 Physical CPUs per Host3264 Physical RAM per Host256GB512GB Virtual Machines per Host Max Network Throughput9Gb/s40Gb/s IOps per Host100,000400,000+ Physical CPUs per Cluster Physical RAM per Cluster8TB32TB

BUILDING A ROBUST VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT

Building a Robust Virtual Environment Plan like you would for a physical implementation. – Build redundancy into your servers, storage infrastructure and network infrastructure – Separate your Capture and Retention Data Capture Data (DB, Exchange Mailboxes, etc.) should be on faster SAS/FC Disks Retention Data (O/S, Backups, Applications) can be loaded to slower SATA Disks

Building a Robust Virtual Environment – Get State of the Art Multi-Core CPU Architecture is Everywhere! Enable Hardware Assisted Virtualization (Intel-VT & AMD-V) Maximize your Memory Investment – Memory is Cheap! – FC, iSCSI or NFS Storage – It Doesnt Matter Basic VMDK Traffic requires low latency, not high bandwidth For Large Deployments you can utilize NFS and iSCSI – If your worried about throughput for large data loads, 10GbE is becoming more cost effective – Verify your Service Console Settings Allocate Maximum RAM to the Service Console (ESX only) – 800MB Enable NTP and make sure its in sync Make sure DNS is functioning (forward and reverse lookups) Make Your Service Console network is redundant – vCenter Services and HA rely on your SC being connected

Building a Robust Virtual Environment VMware Tools – For all the great vCPU Co-Scheduling and Memory Sharing Capabilities built into ESX, VMware Tools on your Virtual Machines MUST always be Up To Date!

Common CPU Performance Issue – Caused by vCPU Over-Subscription When a vCPU needs to be scheduled, the VMkernel maps a vCPU to a hardware execution context. A hardware execution context is a processors capability to schedule one thread of execution. – A core or a hyperthread – VMkernel load balances All the vCPUs in a VM must be simultaneously scheduled. Check CPU %RDY on your VM to see if it is waiting for a physical core or hyperthread. H.E.C.

Resolving CPU Performance Issues – Caused by vCPU Under-Utilization Virtual Machines assigned 2 or 4 vCPUs but are not actually using them. In this scenario youre basically wasting potential CPU cycles for other Virtual Machines that may need them. Check CPU %WAIT to see if your Virtual Machines vCPUs are just sitting there doing nothing. High CPU %WAIT with Low CPU Used means youve assigned too many vCPUs. Reduce to relieve possible contention. – Add additional cores

Common Memory Performance Issues – Caused by Memory Over-Commit The VMkernel and balloon driver (vmmemctl) do a great job delivering and controlling memory to Virtual Machines Check Swap Used for your Virtual Machine in vCenter or ESXTOP Lower Limits & Reservations on non-critical Virtual Machines Increase Physical RAM – Caused by Low VM Memory Assignment Check your Guest O/S Swap to make sure it has low utilization. Check Memory Consumed in vCenter and ESXTOP Increase Virtual RAM Raise Limits and Reservation on Virtual Machine

Disk Resolving I/O Performance Issues – Separate VMDKs based on performance needs High I/O Virtual Machines with Low IOps HDD do not mix More Spindles equals better performance – iSCSI and NFS Based Datastores Utilize Jumbo Frames, LACP ad Link Aggregation with multiple Targets (iSCSI) or Exports (NFS) Watch Network Throughput on ESX servers and also Storage Array – FCP Watch Latency Counters in vCenter

Network Virtual Network Design – Best Practices – Build Redundancy into your vSwitches VMware HA is dependant on your Service Console and its network gateway – Segment VMotion Traffic To optimize available NIC ports, utilize the standby NIC port on the vSwitch containing your Service Console – Verify all physical ports, their associated VLANs and utilize host profiles – Utilize 802.1q VLAN tagging to maximize utilization of your available physical NICs – VMware Fault Tolerance will require its own independent network port for vLockstep traffic. – Monitor Network Throughput in vCenter or ESXTOP

VMware VMDK Hint – I/O Intense Virtual Machines will benefit when their Starting Partition is divisible by – Misalignment can result in degraded performance. The recommended starting value is 32768, typical VMs default setting is – The best option is to fix your template: Prior to O/S installation boot with a WinPE CD Run diskpart Select Disk 0 Create Partition Primary Align=32 Reboot and Install your O/S as normal Vizioncore Has a Utility called vOptimizer Pro to automate This with no downtime!!! – Even if an O/S is already installed!

THANK YOU – QUESTIONS?