This technical note provides additional information about performance counters available in ESX.
This paper describes how timekeeping hardware works in physical machines, how typical guest operating systems use this hardware to keep time, and how VMware products virtualize the hardware.
VMware Management and Automation products provide datacenter automation solutions in IT service delivery and business continuity. These products can be deployed across a shared VMware Infrastructure platform. This paper presents technical guidance and considerations when deploying these products together on a shared VI platform.
This VMware® VMbook focuses on business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) and is intended to guide the reader through the step-by-step process to set-up a multisite VMware Infrastructure that is capable of supporting BCDR services for designated virtual machines at time of test or during an actual event that necessitated the declaration of a disaster, resulting in the activation of services in a designated BCDR site.
VMware Infrastructure 3 provides a set of distributed infrastructure services that make the entire IT environment more serviceable, available, and efficient. Working with VMware ESX 3, VMware VirtualCenter 2, and VMware VMotion, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) dynamically allocates resources to enforce resource management policies while balancing resource usage across multiple ESX hosts. This performance study focuses on understanding the effectiveness and scalability of DRS algorithms. It identifies various scenarios in which you can benefit from DRS and explains how to configure your environment to take best advantage of DRS.
This book provides tips that help administrators maximize the performance of VMware Infrastructure 3 version 3.5. A separate chapter provides guidance on benchmarking VMware ESX systems.
More and more customers are deploying their mission critical applications, prominently Exchange, on VMware Infrastructure platform. This paper describes various options that customers have in protecting Exchange installation against data loss. The paper also summarizes the merits of each of the options.
VMware ESX enables multiple hosts to share the same physical storage reliably through its highly optimized storage stack and VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS). To gain the greatest advantage from shared storage, it is important to understand the potential bottlenecks at various layers and make the necessary configuration changes to get optimal storage performance.This paper presents the results of our studies on storage scalability in a virtual environment with many ESX hosts, many LUNs, or many of both. It examines the effects of I/O queuing at various layers in a virtual infrastructure as more and more virtual machines share the same storage. It considers the effects of SCSI reservations on virtual machine I/O performance. And it looks at ways to mitigate bandwidth bottlenecks when multiple LUNs are connected to a single ESX host. It provides recommendations you can follow to avoid overcommitting storage resources.
This Reviewer's Guide provides a step-by-step process to get VDM 2.1 installed and configured for evaluation purposes.
This white paper is the first in a series that detail deployment considerations that should be taken into account when planning a VMware VDI deployment.
Enterprises continue to move their technologies and services onto the Web. Today, the Web servers that provide these services are distributed across multiple systems. As the number of Web applications increases, it is very common for the number of physical systems in the data center hosting these Web applications to increase along with them. Studies from IDC, among others, describe the challenges IT managers face administering the proliferation of servers used to run Web applications. Virtualization can help businesses to consolidate their Web computing needs onto fewer high performance servers. This approach can simplify management, save operating costs, and increase the efficiency of delivering Web services.
In this paper we explore the configuration and testing of VMware® Infrastructure 3 as a consolidation platform for multiple Apache Web servers. It describes the processes and methodologies we used in the consolidation study. In addition, we describe the results of our performance testing using the industry standard SPECweb2005 workload to determine the effectiveness of this consolidation approach.
Database applications running on individual physical servers represent a large consolidation opportunity. However enterprises considering such consolidation want guidance as to how well databases scale using virtualization.
In this paper we demonstrate that when running multiple virtual machines with Oracle database workloads on VMware ESX, the individual performance remains close to that of the Oracle database workload in a single virtual machine, while CPU utilization scales in a near-linear fashion.
This scalability is one of the factors that makes VMware ESX the perfect platform on which to consolidate demanding, mission-critical workloads such as Oracle databases.
This white paper provides a detailed description of the technical aspects and benefits of deploying VMware Virtual Infrastructure version 3 on EMC Symmetrix devices using Virtual Provisioning.
VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is an integrated desktop virtualization solution that delivers enterprise-class control and manageability with a familiar user experience. VMware Virtual Desktop Manager provides simplified management and secure provisioning of virtual desktops.
VMware Virtual Desktop Manager is tested for compatibility with a variety of thin client devices. Our goal is to support a wide variety of thin clients and virtual desktop devices used to access virtual desktops through VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.
As virtualization of network DMZs becomes more common, demand is increasing for information to help network security professionals understand and mitigate the risks associated with this practice. This paper provides detailed descriptions of three different virtualized DMZ configurations and identifies best practice approaches that enable secure deployment.
VMware® VirtualCenter uses a database to store metadata on the state of a VMware Infrastructure environment. Performance statistics and their associated stored procedure operations constitute the largest and the most resource‐intensive component of the VirtualCenter database. Hence the performance of your VirtualCenter database depends upon the frequency at which you collect performance statistics and the level of detail of the statistics you store. VirtualCenter 2.5 features a number of enhancements that are aimed at greatly improving the performance and scalability of the performance statistics operations in the VirtualCenter database. The purpose of this study is to present the performance results of tests we conducted to validate these performance enhancements and to provide best practices information for configuring a VirtualCenter database. The study also provides information for sizing the server you use to host the VirtualCenter database based on these performance results. Although the new features in VirtualCenter 2.5 benefit users with any of the supported databases, the examples and performance data presented in this study are specific to Microsoft SQL Server and the paper assumes that you have a working knowledge of SQL Server.
Real-time collaboration has become a vital component of on-demand business, and IBM Lotus Sametime has quickly become an important component in many IBM Lotus Notes® and IBM Lotus Domino® environments. Typical Lotus Sametime deployments that support several thousand users require multiple servers in the physical environment, which results in high capital and operating costs. Virtualization offers unprecedented opportunities in commodity server consolidation, workload management, and return on investment.
This white paper describes a virtualized infrastructure that applies storage and server virtualization technologies to cost-effectively achieve a flexible, high-performance, dynamic IT infrastructure that is simple to manage and scale.
The networking performance of a virtual machine is greatly influenced by the choice of virtual network devices in the virtual machine and the physical devices configured on the host machine. ESX Server 3.5 supports multiple virtual network devices (vlance, e1000, vmxnet), each with its own usability advantages and performance benefits. It is clear that vlance is not the best choice for high-performance workloads. However, many users are still uncertain about the performance differences between e1000 and vmxnet virtual network devices.
The new features in VMware® Infrastructure 3 makes it even easier for organizations to virtualize their most demanding and intense workloads. The new version of VMware Infrastructure 3 provides significant performance enhancements, including the release of VMware ESX Server 3.5 and a new ultra-thin hypervisor called VMware ESX Server 3i that can significantly
There is a general belief that due to the extra layer introduced by virtualization code, networking performance in a virtualized environment cannot match the performance in a native environment.
VMware ESX Server offers two choices for managing disk access in a virtual machine—VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) and raw device mapping (RDM). It is very important to understand the I/O characteristics of these disk access management systems in order to choose the right access type for a particular application. Choosing the right disk access management method can be a key factor in achieving high system performance for enterprise‐class applications.
VMware ESX Server supports the use of large pages inside virtual machines. The large‐page support enables server applications to establish large‐page memory regions. Memory address translations use translation lookaside buffers (TLB) inside the CPU. The use of large pages can potentially increase TLB access efficiency and thus improve program performance. This study examines the performance of this feature.
VMware ESX Server 3.5 introduces support for guest operating systems that use VMware's paravirtualization standard, Virtual Machine Interface (VMI). This paper describes VMI and its performance benefits, concluding that VMI-style paravirtualization offers performance improvements for a wide variety of workloads, but that the actual performance gains depend on the nature of those workloads.
With the increasing deployment of VMware® ESX Server for mission-critical applications, it becomes even more important to maintain the performance of these applications in virtual machines. The complexity of virtualization, especially when server and storage resources are shared across multiple components, makes it more difficult for an administrator to detect and solve performance problems.
Using CLARiiON®’s Navisphere® Quality of Service (NQM) product and VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler allows you to maintain application service levels in virtual machines. This greatly minimizes the time and resources needed to manage and fix performance issues.H2756 - Using EMC Celerra IP Storage with VMware Infrastructure 3 over iSCSI and NFS (EMC White Paper)
With th release of VMware Infrastructure 3, virtual hardware support was extended to include the use of IP storage devices. This support enables ESX environments to take full advantage of the NFS protocol and IP block storage using iSCSI. This significant improvement profivdes a method to tie virtualized computing to virtualized storage, offering a dynamic set of capabilities within the data center and resulting in improved performance and system reliability. This white paper describes how best to utilize EMC Celerra in a VMware ESX environment.
VMware ESX Server 3.5 has been tested and deployed in a variety of storage area network (SAN) environments. This guide describes the combination of HBAs (host bus adapters) and storage devices currently tested by VMware and its storage partners.
VMware ESX Server Software delivers high performance I/O for PCI-based SCSI, RAID, Fibre Channel, and Ethernet controllers. To achieve high performance, these devices are accessed directly through device drivers in the ESX Server host, and not through a host operating system as with VMware Workstation and GSX Server products.
VMware certifies that specific systems and components are compatible with ESX Server software. Through the VMware Preferred Hardware Partner Program, ESX Server software works with leading server vendors to ensure that appropriate configurations of their current and future server products are certified.
This is not an exhaustive list of all backup software packages and versions that are compatible with ESX Server software, but it represents those servers that VMware or its partners have tested with the current release of ESX Server software.
VMware ESX Server is tested for compatibility with a variety of major guest operating systems running in virtual machines. Additionally, VMware ESX Server is tested for compatibility with currently shipping platforms from the major server makers in pre-release testing. Our goal is to support a variety of storage and network adapters used as standard options for these platforms as they come to market.
Virtualization is revolutionizing data center computing by making it easy for people to run multiple operating systems and multiple applications seamlessly on the same computer. More and more organizations are adopting VMware® Infrastructure 3 for server consolidation and to reduce the total cost of ownership.
VMware ESX Server 3.5 is designed for high performance. With a number of optimizations for superior performance, even the most I/O‐intensive applications perform well when deployed on VMware Infrastructure 3. In this paper we compare the performance of a virtual machine to that of a similarly configured native machine using the industry standard SPECweb2005 workload. In our virtualized tests we achieved close to 85 percent of native throughput performance using the highly network‐intensive SPECweb2005 workload. In the tests focused on measuring latency, we did not observe any noticeable difference in application latency between the native and virtual environments. These results demonstrate that users need not sacrifice performance in order to embrace the benefits of virtualization technology.
This technical note provides a reference for configuring Wyse V10L and S10 devices for use with VDM. VDM supports the Wyse V10L and S10 Thin Client devices, running Wyse Thin OS version 5.3.0.9 or later. For detailed information about deploying and managing Wyse thin client devices, contact Wyse directly.
Wyse Thin Client devices with versions of the Wyse Thin OS earlier than 5.3.0.9 do not support HTTPS connection to a VDM Server. You must upgrade the Wyse Thin OS to version 5.3.0.9 or later to use HTTPS.
Unlike VDM Web Access or VDM Client, Wyse thin clients connect to desktop virtual machines directly using RDP and connections do not pass through a VDM Connection Server. As a result Wyse thin clients cannot be used in DMZ deployments.
VMware® Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) transforms the way customers use and manage desktop operating systems. Desktop instances can be deployed rapidly in secure data centers to facilitate high availability and disaster recovery, protect the integrity of enterprise information, and remove data from local devices that are susceptible to theft or loss. Isolating each desktop instance in its own virtual machine eliminates typical application compatibility issues and improves users’ personal computing environments.
This guide offers best practices for creating Windows XP-based templates for VMware VDI-based solutions and for preparing the same templates for use with Virtual Desktop Manager 2.
Once appropriate server-grade hardware has been selected, load balancing become an important consideration for addressing a configuration’s scalability and fault tolerance.
In general, load-balanced configurations use multiple VDM Connection Servers installed in a primary-and-replica manner, with the first server installed as the primary and subsequent servers are installed as replicas. VDM Connection Servers provide session management and handle all incoming client requests, directing them to the appropriate virtual desktop session, and VDM Security Servers provide SSL tunneling capabilities for encrypting communication between the client devices and the VDM Connection Servers.
The configuration of a load-balanced solution largely depends on the requirements of the organization for which it is being deployed. Companies that already have a load balancing solution in place may be able to utilize it for VDI since the load generated by the VDI solution is minimal. Both hardware-based load balancing appliances and inexpensive (or free) software-based load balancing products can be considered as candidate solutions.
For many organizations, HIPAA and PCI compliance is no longer optional. Penalties are increasingly stiff, and the ultimate cost of non-compliance – the breach of personal data – can damage organizations in multiple ways. Compliance, and validation of compliance, is not easily achieved. It is especially difficult when computing environments are widely distributed and not all computers are centrally managed.
Virtualization technologies, including virtual desktops, offer an improved means to centralize computing, management and monitoring while still providing users local access and full functionality. For organizations seeking stronger HIPAA and PCI compliance, relying on virtual desktops for access to sensitive systems provides both cost savings and increased manageability and security. With an integrated compliance monitoring and reporting system such as the vmSight virtual network intelligence suite, virtual desktops can be used to increase compliance and reduce data breaches while also reducing IT costs.
This paper demonstrates that the four network storage connection options available to ESX Server are all capable of reaching a level of performance limited only by the media and storage devices. And even with multiple virtual machines running concurrently on the same ESX Server host, the high performance is maintained. The data on CPU costs indicates that Fibre Channel and hardware iSCSI are the most CPU efficient, but in cases in which CPU consumption is not a concern, software iSCSI and NFS can also be part of a high‐performance solution.
This document discusses ways to maintain the VirtualCenter database for increased performance and manageability. It covers all versions of VirtualCenter 2.0. The recommendations here pertain specifically to SQL Server, version 2000 and later. This document assumes the reader has a working knowledge of SQL Server.
With the launch of VMware Infrastructure 3 version 3.5 comes a new version of VMware’s hypervisor, ESX Server 3.5. One of the core focus areas for Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 is to enable greater uptime and agility in the management of the virtual infrastructure environment. VMware has addressed this by bringing new levels of flexibility and connectivity options to Virtual Infrastructure 3 version 3.5.
This paper descibes the new features of VCB introduced with VI 3, version 3.5. It explains the features and how customers can benefit with those features.
This white paper focuses exclusively on CPU compatibility and outlines CPU compatibility checks performed by VMware VirtualCenter before allowing migration with VMotion. It describes why some CPU compatibility constraints make VMotion possible only between certain revisions of CPUs. The appendices detail some differences in features and extensions in current CPUs and describe procedures that could be used to relax some CPU compatibility constraints to facilitate VMotion.
This whitepaper is intended to enhance the reader’s knowledge by discussing deployment considerations, best practices recommendations, and troubleshooting tips when implementing VMware Consolidated Backup. The whitepaper is a collection of information gathered by real world field implementations, expertise of VMware Professional Services and in-house testing. Insightful information useful in troubleshooting VCB environment is also provided.
VMware ESX Server offers three choices for managing disk access in a virtual machine—VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS), virtual raw device mapping (RDM), and physical raw device mapping. It is very important to understand the I/O characteristics of these disk access management systems in order to choose the right access type for a particular application. Choosing the right disk access management method can be a key factor in achieving high system performance for enterprise‐class applications.
This study provides performance characterization of the various disk access management methods supported by VMware ESX Server. The goal is to provide data on performance and system resource utilization at various load levels for different types of work loads. This information offers you an idea of relative throughput, I/O rate, and CPU efficiency for each of the options so you can select the appropriate disk access method for your application.
This document provides information about how to configure connections between different backup software products and VMware® ESX Server 3 hosts. The document explains how to open predefined firewall ports for supported backup products and how to open specific ports from a command line. If the backup product you use requires additional configuration changes to work with ESX Server 3, the document describes any specific steps you need to perform.
VMware® High Availability (VMware HA) monitors your virtual infrastructure for ESX Server host failures and restarts virtual machines that are interrupted by those failures on alternate hosts. Starting with ESX Server 3.5, VMware HA can also detect and handle the failures of individual virtual machines and respond appropriately based on your specifications.
With this additional functionality, called Virtual Machine Failure Monitoring, VMware HA deals with both host operating system and guest operating system failures.
VMware® ESX Server 3.5 and ESX Server 3i version 3.5 enhance ESX Server native multipathing by providing experimental support for round‐robin load balancing. This technical note explains how round‐robin load balancing works and how to set it.
N‐Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) is an ANSI T11 standard that describes how a single Fibre Channel HBA port can register with the fabric using several worldwide port names (WWPNs). This allows a fabric‐attached N‐port to claim multiple fabric addresses. Each address appears as a unique entity on the Fibre Channel fabric.
The primary source of information on configuring NPIV in a VMware Infrastructure 3 environment is the Fibre Channel SAN Configuration Guide, available on the VMware Web site.
This technical note provides additional details about certain specific NPIV configurations and information on diagnostic techniques that may be helpful as you configure NPIV. It also includes information to help you understand error messages that may appear as you are working with NPIV in a VMware Infrastructure environment.
NetFlow is a general networking tool with multiple uses, including network monitoring and profiling, billing, intrusion detection and prevention, networking forensics, and SOX compliance. NetFlow sends aggregated networking flow data to a third‐party collector (an appliance or server). The collector and analyzer report on various information such as the current top flows consuming the most bandwidth in a particular virtual switch, which IP addresses are behaving irregularly, and the number of bytes a particular virtual machine has sent and received in the past 24 hours.
The Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) is a virtual machine distribution format that supports sharing virtual machines between products and organizations. The format facilitates the use of virtual appliances, which are preconfigured virtual machines that package applications with the operating system they require. Because OVF runs on multiple platforms, a virtual appliance is ready to run without significant additional configuration.
This technical note discusses using ESX Server hosts with a Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) NSC or USP SAN storage array using FibreChannel (FC) connections. These storage arrays use advanced storage virtualization technology, and setup differs from setup of a nonâ€virtualized SAN storage array that is to be used with ESX Server hosts.
A virtual appliance is a pre-installed, pre-configured operating system and software solution delivered inside a virtual machine. Deploying a software solution as a virtual appliance enables you to build a complete turnkey package that customers are able to download and immediately deploy. Thus, customers skip the time-consuming and often support-intensive task of installing and configuring the appliance. This lets customers focus all their energies on trying or using your solution rather than struggling to get it to run. This document describes the best practices for building a virtual appliance. It covers high level design principles as well as low level details for building virtual appliances ready for certification under the VMware Certified Virtual Appliance program. In turn, virtual appliances built according to these standards will allow your customers or prospective customers to test or use your virtual appliance with all the VMware virtualization platforms.
VMware ESX Server 3i is the next-generation hypervisor, offering improved security, increased reliability, and simplified management. In many respects, the functionality of an ESX Server 3i system is the same as for ESX Server 3. However, the architecture of ESX Server 3i points the way to a new management model for a virtualized infrastructure. This paper covers the management of an ESX Server 3i system and lays out the characteristics of this new management model.
VMware ESX Server 3i is the next-generation hypervisor, providing a new foundation for virtual infrastructure. This innovative architecture operates independently from any general purpose operating system, offering improved security, increased reliability, and simplified management. This paper describes the architecture and operation of ESX Server 3i and discusses the new management model associated with it.
In 1998, VMware figured out how to virtualize the x86 platform, once thought to be impossible, and created the market for x86 virtualization. The solution was a combination of binary translation and direct execution on the processor that allowed multiple guest OSes to run in full isolation on the same computer with readily affordable virtualization overhead.
The savings that tens of thousands of companies have generated from the deployment of this technology is further driving the rapid adoption of virtualized computing from the desktop to the data center. As new vendors enter the space and attempt to differentiate their products, many are creating confusion with their marketing claims and terminology. For example, while hardware assist is a valuable technique that will mature and expand the envelope of workloads that can be virtualized, paravirtualization is not an entirely new technology that offers an “order of magnitude” greater performance.
While this is a complex and rapidly evolving space, the technologies employed can be readily explained to help companies understand their options and choose a path forward. This white paper attempts to clarify the various techniques used to virtualize x86 hardware, the strengths and weaknesses of each, and VMware’s community approach to develop and employ the most effective of the emerging virtualization techniques. Figure 1 provides a summary timeline of x86
virtualization technologies from VMware’s binary translation to the recent application of kernel paravirtualization and hardware-assisted virtualization.
This performance study clearly demonstrates that VMware Infrastructure 3 provides an excellent production-ready virtualization platform for customers looking to deploy Microsoft SQL Server inside virtual machines. Furthermore, together with virtualization-based distributed infrastructure services such as VMotion, VMware High Availability, and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler, VMware Infrastructure 3 can provide increased serviceability, efficiency, and reliability for your SQL Server deployments. This should offer transformative cost savings to your dynamic data center.
With the release of VMware Infrastructure 3, VMware added ESX Server support for iSCSI storage. With rapidly increasing adoption rates, many VMware customers requested iSCSI as an option for storage virtualization and are now deploying it as a lower cost alternative to Fibre Channel SANs. This paper is intended to help you understand the design considerations and deployment options for deploying VMware Infrastructure 3 using iSCSI storage. The first section provides an overview of iSCSI terminology, benefits, and limitations. The second section provides a high-level overview of the VMware iSCSI implementation using either a software initiator or a hardware initiator. The third section provides a detailed set of deployment steps covering both software and hardware initiator options. The paper concludes with two appendices that provide software versus hardware initiator iSCSI performance test results and details on command line options for managing iSCSI from the ESX Server host. This paper highlights trade-offs and factors to consider when deploying iSCSI storage to support VMware Infrastructure 3. It is a complement to, not a replacement for, VMware product documentation.
The paper provides recommendations to provide IT management with the most salient best practices and implementation strategies to get started and to accelerate a successful roll out of virtualization technology. These guidelines are based on experiences and best practices accumulated by many of our leading customers and partners.
The Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) describes an open, secure, portable, efficient and extensible format for the packaging and distribution of (collections of) virtual machines.
The Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) specification is a hypervisor-neutral, efficient, extensible, and open specification for the packaging and distribution of virtual appliances composed of one or more VMs. It aims to facilitate the automated, secure management not only of virtual machines but the appliance as a functional unit. For the OVF format to succeed it must be developed and endorsed by ISVs, virtual appliance vendors, operating system vendors, as well as virtual platform vendors, and must be developed within a standards-based framework.
You can combine two very powerful solutions, VMware Infrastructure and CA XOsoft's WANSyncHA, to provide a multi-layered disaster recovery solution that covers a wide array of contingencies, is extremely cost-effective, and provides an unusually high degree of robustness and simplicity.
VMware ACE 2.0 Enterprise Edition enables you to apply corporate IT policies to a virtual machine containing an operating system, enterprise applications, and data to create a secure, isolated PC environment known as an “ACE virtual machine.” This technical note explains how to set up VMware Workstation with ACE option pack to most efficiently create and manage ACE masters.
The purpose of this technical note is to provide an in-depth view of Pocket ACE, a new feature of VMware ACE 2 Enterprise Edition. This guide is intended for architects or administrators looking for more information about Pocket ACE and how it might be used in their environments. This guide covers the steps required to create an ACE master, policy, and package for deploying Pocket ACE instances.
This paper describes the use of VMware virtualization and NSI Doubletake replication technology to implement a DR solution. The paper educates the reader about using the virtualization technology to protect physical environment in primary data centers and also talks about benefits of P2V and V2V DR.
This document provides technical details for the different methods of backup and recovery of VMware Infrastructure using EMC Avamar software. It gives a brief overview of VMware Infrastructure and EMC Avamar, outlines the architectural requirements for each method, and reviews advantages and key considerations to consider.
VMware Infrastructure 3 provides a rich set of networking capabilities that integrate well with sophisticated enterprise networks. With virtual networking, you can network virtual machines in the same way that you do physical machines and can build complex networks within a single ESX Server host or across multiple ESX Server hosts, for production deployments or development and testing purposes. This guide is for VMware Infrastructure 3 users who want a clearer understanding of the basic design of the networking capabilities in VMware Infrastructure 3 and how that design affects deployment in the datacenter.
The VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) is a high performance cluster file system that allows virtualization to scale beyond the boundaries of a single system. This paper gives a technology overview of VMFS, including a discussion of features and their benefits. The paper highlights how VMFS capabilities enable greater scalability and decreased management overhead. It also provides best practices and architectural considerations for deployment of VMFS.
Provisioning storage for a virtual environment requires navigating several layers of abstraction, making it desirable to view this as a stack in order to follow the complete path successfully. The purpose of this paper is to define the options, choices and terms that can help trace the route through this complex set of dependencies.
This paper discusses the performance and scalability of Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 when deployed within virtual machines running under VMware ESX Server 3.01.
This document describes the use of Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS) to provide high availability for VirtualCenter. This capability is available in VirtualCenter 2.x starting with VirtualCenter 2.0.1 Patch 2. You can implement the clustering architecture described in this paper whether VirtualCenter runs on a physical server or in a virtual machine.
Scaling and performance of VMware ESX Server 3.0.1 and XenEnterprise 3.2.0 are measured by running a heavy networking load simultaneously in each of several uniprocessor virtual machines. The results are also compared with a single SMP native machine running the same total load.
This paper describes the real-world experiences of a customer that reduced its x86 server count by 60% and decreased overall operating costs.
This book provides guidance in obtaining the best possible performance using VMware Workstation 6.0, both in a production environment and when running benchmarks.
In this paper, we characterize the virtualization overheads of virtual machines by measuring the performance under heavy networking in a uniprocessor virtual machine.
This paper introduces you to the way Virtual Infrastructure 3 controls access to resources and describes techniques you can use to assign appropriate access rights efficiently. It explains the concept of roles, provides information to help in the design of custom roles, and gives recommendations for how to work with roles and privileges in VirtualCenter.
Running VirtualCenter in a virtual machine is fully supported by VMware to the same degree as if it were installed on a physical server. The purpose of this paper is to provide guidelines on how to deploy VirtualCenter in a virtual machine, including sizing, installation, functionality, and configuration of VMware HA.
This guide, or “cookbook,” describes how to design and deploy virtual infrastructure systems using VMware Infrastructure 3 with SANs (storage area networks). It describes SAN options supported with VMware Infrastructure 3 and also describes benefits, implications, and disadvantages of various design choices.
This document lists the metrics available for monitoring from VirtualCenter. It includes guidelines for setting the Statistics Collection Level, and indicates the types of metrics available for each level.
This document describes the relationships of the provided database views in your VMware VirtualCenter database. This document does not describe how to create or use database views. This document describes the database views for VirtualCenter version 2.x.
VMware Infrastructure 3 is one of the most secure and robust virtualization platforms available. VMware has both the technology and the processes to ensure that this high standard is maintained in all current and future products. This document discusses the architecture of VMware Infrastructure 3, focusing on the security aspects of the design.
This paper provides recommendations for steps you can take to ensure that your VMware Infrastructure 3 environment is properly secured. It also explains in detail the security-related configuration options of the components of VMware Infrastructure 3 and the consequences for security of enabling certain capabilities.
This paper provides a quantitative and qualitative comparison of two virtualization hypervisors available for the x86 architecture — VMware ESX Server 3.0.1 and open-source Xen 3.0.3 — to validate their readiness for enterprise datacenters.
The paper provides a list of performance tips that cover the most performance-critical areas of Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3). The intended audience is system administrators who have already deployed VI3 and are looking to maximize their performance.
Deploying Microsoft Exchange in VMware Infrastructure offers many advantages, including higher availability,simplified recovery, and more efficient use of resources. This paper discusses best practices for running Exchange 2003 in a VMware Infrastructure environment, in the areas of servers, virtual machines, storage, and implementation. In addition, a case study shows an example architecture, and the Appendix provides some sample metrics for Exchange performance.
This Technical Note provides information about replacing the default certificates supplied with VirtualCenter Server hosts.
VDI allows IT administrators to host and administer user desktops on Virtual Infrastructure in the datacenter. Users access their desktop using a remote desktop protocol. While sharing similarities with other computing models, VDI offers many new and compelling benefits for increasing manageability, performance, and security of user desktops/PCs. This paper compares VDI to other user management strategies and highlights VDI’s benefits for particular use cases.
This technical note describes how to configure the selected management agents for use with ESX Server 3.0.1: Dell OpenManage 5.1 agents, HP Insight Manager 7.6.0 agents, and IBM Director 5.10.3 agents.
This white paper characterizes the performance of a web-based OLTP workload using IBM DB2 9 and running in VMware Infrastructure 3 environment. The results described in this paper support the conclusion that running IBM DB2 in VMware virtual machines can provide an effective production ready platform for hosting multiple virtualized OLTP workloads.
This white paper presents data showing the number of Citrix sessions you can sustain when running Citrix Presentation Server 4.0 inside a virtual machine, and then measures scalability with 1, 2, 4 and 8 VMs. For ESX 3, engineering improved Citrix performance in a virtual machine and we want to showcase those gains, as well as present best practices for performance.
To achieve best performance in a consolidated environment, you must consider ready time — the time a virtual machine must wait in a ready-to-run state before it can be scheduled on a CPU. This paper provides information to help you understand the factors that influence ready time on an ESX Server 3.0 system.
This white paper describes what resources should be backed up on an ESX Server system and explains the options available for that backup, including advantages and disadvantages of each option. The paper also offers some recommendations based on these trade-offs.
This paper applies to VMware Infrastructure 3. The corresponding paper for ESX Server 2.x is available at http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/resources/237
Partition alignment is a known issue in physical file systems, and its remedy is well-documented. The goal of the testing reported in this paper was to validate the assumption that unaligned partitions also impose a penalty when the partition is a VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMware VMFS) partition.
This paper lists a summary of the results of our testing, recommendations for VMware VMFS partition alignment, and the steps needed to create aligned VMware VMFS partitions.
The memory management capabilities of VMware ESX Server 3.0 provide a unique and sophisticated way to maximize the usage of physical memory within a single box. For many workloads, memory is the limiting factor, and effective memory management enables more virtual machines to share a single server, increasing ROI for consolidation. Advances in virtualization, CPU, and memory technology make the addition of memory one of the most effective investments for maximizing the utilization of an ESX Server host.
The VMware ESX 3 Server software maintenance tool, esxupdate, is a utility that efficiently updates VMware ESX Server hosts. Use it to install software updates, enforce software update policies, and track installed software. The benefits of this mechanism include smaller distribution downloads, atomic updates, ability to automate update deployment, selectability by update classification, and automatic dependency resolution.
To use ESX Server effectively with a SAN, youre expected to be familiar with the SAN technology. This white paper offers a brief introduction to some basic SAN concepts, but doesn't aim to be an exhaustive source of information on SANs.
This document provides information about how to configure ESX Server to use Active Directory for authentication.
This paper applies to VMware Infrastructure 3. The corresponding paper for ESX Server 2.x is available at http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/resources/429
Using VMware technology as a foundation, Smartronix, a global professional solutions provider,created a complete datacenter that is self-contained and easily transported to any location at a moment’s notice. This paper documents the architecture of this portable datacenter solution.
This paper presents VMmark, a novel benchmark for quantifying the performance of virtualized environments. VMmark is designed as a tile-based benchmark consisting of a diverse set of workloads commonly found in the datacenter. The workloads comprising each tile are run simultaneously in separate virtual machines at load levels that are typical of virtualized environments. The performance of each workload is measured and then combined with the other workloads to form the score for the individual tile. Multiple tiles can be run simultaneously to increase the overall score.
This solutions guide describes integration of the VMware ESX Server with EMC Symmetrix networked storage systems—and software including EMC Symmetrix Remote Data Facility (SRDF) and EMC TimeFinder local replication software. Topics covered include installation, setup, configuration, and best practices; how TimeFinder can be used with VMware ESX; and how SRDF can be leveraged with VMware ESX Server to provide business restart processing.
This technical white paper talks about the way Double-Take's replication solution can be used in VMware environment. It also talks about a customer experience and lists a few example scenarios.
This whitepaper discusses the cost of over-provisioning servers and storage in an IT infrastructure, and how this unnecessary cost can be reduced and even eliminated through combining server virtualization technology and utility storage. The combination of VMware ESX Server and 3PAR Utility Storage results in a powerful virtualized utility computing platform.
This solutions guide describes integration of the VMware ESX Server with EMC CLARiiON networked storage systems—and software including EMC SnapView, EMC MirrorView, and EMC SAN Copy. Download this guide for detailed information and instruction on how CLARiiON storage systems and software enhance VMware functionality by providing capabilities to efficiently grow, clone, and/or remotely replicate virtual environments.
Because of the breadth of the changes in VMware Infrastructure 3, environments that currently run ESX Server 2.x and VirtualCenter 1.x must be upgraded with procedures that utilize special capabilities designed into the product. This guide aims to help IT administrators and architects understand the upgrade process and plan for it appropriately.
VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is a server-based computing offering that provides desktop environments as an enterprise hosted service. VDI allows administrators to maintain and manage all user applications, data, and environments in the centrally located data center.
This white paper describes the testing methodology, results, and analysis and sizing guidelines for setting up Virtual Desktop Infrastructure using VMware Infrastructure 3.
This paper describes the design and implementation of a system that uses virtual machine technology to provide fast, transparent application migration. This is the first system that can migrate unmodified applications on unmodified mainstream Intel x86-based operating system, including Microsoft Windows, Linux, Novell NetWare and others. Neither the application nor any clients communicating with the application can tell that the application has been migrated. Experimental measurements show that for a variety of workloads, application downtime caused by migration is less than a second.
This paper introduces several novel ESX Server mechanisms and policies for managing memory. A ballooning technique reclaims the pages considered least valuable by the operating system running in a virtual machine. An idle memory tax achieves efficient memory utilization while maintaining performance isolation guarantees. Content-based page sharing
and hot I/O page remapping exploit transparent page remapping to eliminate redundancy and reduce copying overheads. These techniques are combined to efficiently support virtual machine workloads that overcommit memory.
This paper focuses on VMwareWorkstation’s approach to virtualizing I/O devices. This paper studies the virtualization and performance of an Ethernet adapter on VMware Workstation. Results indicate that with optimizations, VMware Workstation’s hosted virtualization architecture can match native I/O throughput on standard PCs.
This paper studies the performance of a key component of the ESX Server architecture: its storage subsystem. We characterize the performance of native systems and virtual machines using a series of disk microbenchmarks on several different storage systems. We show that the virtual machines perform well compared to native, and that the I/O behavior of virtual machines closely matches that of the native server. We then discuss how the microbenchmarks can be used to estimate virtual machine performance for disk-intensive applications by studying two workloads: a simple file server and a commercial mail server.
The main technical contributions of this paper are (1) a review of VMware Workstation’s software VMM, focusing on performance properties of the virtual instruction execution engine; (2) a review of the emerging hardware support, identifying performance trade-offs; (3) a quantitative performance comparison of a software and a hardware VMM.
This paper looks at the best practices when running VMware ESX Server and IBM WebSphere Application Server on a large symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) server to achieve the best application performance (throughput and response time). Our tests concluded that the use of VMware software is an excellent option for those wanting to run WebSphere Application Server in a virtualized SMP environment.
This document explains how to install and monitor VMDesched on Linux and Windows guest operating systems. It also describes timer interrupt virtualization issues resolved by VMDesched and how VMDesched works.
When installed, the VMDesched component provides two key benefits:
• Improved accuracy for guest operating system CPU time accounting when physical CPU resources are overcommitted.
• Improved guest operating system timekeeping with respect to real time.
The experimental VMware Descheduled Time Accounting component, VMDesched, is an optional new component of VMware Tools. VMDesched is available starting with ESX Server 3.0.
In general, VMware recommends that users avoid running third-party software in the VMware ESX Server service console. Clear exceptions to this policy are software packages explicitly identified in ESX Server compatibility guides. This technical note outlines the reasons for this recommendation and guidelines developers should follow when writing software to run in the ESX Server service console.
This white paper provides lab-tested guidance for implementing an enterprise messaging system using Microsoft Exchange messaging products and VMware ESX Server 2.5.
The paper provides referential and prescriptive guidance to enable a customer or solution provider to adequately plan, build, deploy, and operate an enterprise messaging system that results in the following benefits to an organization:
• Availability to meet the service level agreements (SLAs)
• Security to meet the business requirements
• Scalability to meet the projected business volumes
• Predictable and reliable performance from pre-tested implementations
• Reduced implementation time, cost, and operational risk, leading to a faster time to benefit
The sample registry file to accompany the technical note Configuring VMware ACE as the Primary Desktop Environment, which explains how to configure VMware ACE and a host computer so the virtual machine running in VMware ACE is the primary desktop environment.
This technical note examines key issues in configuring iSCSI storage with virtual machines running on an ESX Server system.
VMware ESX Server Software delivers high performance I/O for PCI-based SCSI, RAID, Fibre Channel, and Ethernet controllers. To achieve high performance, these devices are accessed directly through device drivers in the ESX Server host, and not through a host operating system as with VMware Workstation and GSX Server products.
VMware certifies that specific systems and components are compatible with ESX Server software. Through the VMware Preferred Hardware Partner Program, ESX Server software works with leading server vendors to ensure that appropriate configurations of their current and future server products are certified.
This is not an exhaustive list of all backup software packages and versions that are compatible with ESX Server software, but it represents those servers that VMware or its partners have tested with the current release of ESX Server software.
VMware ESX Server is tested for compatibility with a variety of major guest operating systems running in virtual machines. Additionally, VMware ESX Server is tested for compatibility with currently shipping platforms from the major server makers in pre-release testing. Our goal is to support a variety of storage and network adapters used as standard options for these platforms as they come to market.
VMware ESX Server 3.x has been tested and deployed in a variety of storage area network (SAN) environments. This guide describes the combination of HBAs (host bus adapters) and storage devices currently tested by VMware and its storage partners.
Using VMware GSX Server with LANDesk Management Suite to improve patch deployment speed and reliability.
Use Workstation 5, with its linked clones and multiple snapshots features, to set up a repository of clean development environments in a series of virtual machines and then quickly clone and download a desired setup in minutes.
Use Workstation 5, with its teams feature, to set up an entire three-tier configuration for development and testing, virtually, on a single physical machine.
This white paper provides guidance in implementing benchmark tests using VMware Workstation 5.5. It addresses benchmarking methodology, configuring for performance, ensuring “apples-to-apples” comparisons, and avoiding common pitfalls.
This paper demonstrates how adopting virtual infrastructure helps organizations drive costs out of their infrastructure, respond faster to business needs and increase consistency of operations.
This presentation provides an overview of VirtualCenter product components, system requirements, the VirtualCenter database, authentication, sample configurations, and VMotion considerations.
This paper compares three VMware performance tools and highlights where the values of the output can differ, focusing on CPU and memory statistics.
This paper presents a check list that VMware Support uses to iteratively eliminate potential performance issues until the system is running optimally.
This paper introduces vmkusage and describes how to use it to analyze and isolate ESX performance problems.
This paper provides several useful tips for tuning and troubleshooting your ESX Server machine.
This paper describes the process for troubleshooting a suspected performance problem at the virtualization layer (i.e., the ESX Server layer) using the esxtop tool.
This paper describes the process for troubleshooting a suspected performance problem at the machi