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KonstantinLitov
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Guest OS and Host performance optimization

Hey,

Does anyone have any good writeups/documentation for the best way to optimize host confugarions in terms of resource management for guest OS. I have over 60 machines running in my enviroment, and we have decided to try and optimize our ESX host for optimal performance. We are looking at playing with CPU Reservations, and restrictions based on groups, memory reservations etc.

Links to docs would be greatly appreciated, or advise as to where to start with such a tasks.

Thanks

-Kon

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AndreTheGiant
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There are also some commercial product to do this.

Like vOptimized from Vizioncore.

Andre

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Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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needToFind
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I have over 60 machines running in my enviroment,

60 ESX server or 60 guest os in single ESX? please mention your hardware configuration.

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KonstantinLitov
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~60 Guests(45-50 running at a time) on a single Host with two 2.99Ghz quad cores, and 36GB Ram.(This is the host I care the most about in terms of optimizing).

Also, just to be clear. We are not trying to make our VM's faster/more efficient, but to fit more on one host.

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kjb007
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60 guests is a very good ratio. What exactly are you trying to optimize? What kind of issues, are you seeing? With that many vm's, I imagine you would have disk issues first and foremost, not to mention some slowness in response time from the cpu's being highly oversubscribed.

-KjB

VMware vExpert

vExpert/VCP/VCAP vmwise.com / @vmwise -KjB
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KonstantinLitov
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THis being mostly a functional test enviroment, performance is not a big issue. We have over 1.9TB of storage on this host, most guests don't use more than 10-15GB OS drives.

We currentl are not seeing performance issues, and most of our hosts are runnng idle and are barely using resource. What we are trying to accomplish is squize as many guest instances as we can onto this single host, and still allow the host to be stable and not become too over burdoned, especialy during instances of start up and shut down.

We are mostly concrened with CPU, as everything else we can upgrade(such as network, ram, and storage). And the limit that we seem to be hitting is CPU. VI Client is currently showing ths host has CPU reservation at 23000Mhz, out of a possible 23900Mhz. I am still trying to understand how VMware pre-determines these reservations, and ifwe can lower the per guest reservations lower, and what would happen during boot of one or multiple guests.

Since there is really no metric out there(that i could find) of how many hosts you can support on a specific hardware set. It is really hard to know where the limit really is.

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kjb007
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The number of guests you can support is pretty subjective to what you are doing. If you want just a basic number, you can check out the vmmark test results. They give performance-type results for various hardware types. The number if based on tiles, and then rated on those files and number of tiles. A tile is 5-6 vm's running different kind of workloads (db/file server/ web server / messaging / java). That is about as close as you'll get to an actual number. They are valuable when comparing relative performance results from differing hardware, but they may be of interest to you as a sort of baseline.

Since you're running such a high number of vm's,reservations / limits, may actually hurt your performance, because you're limiting what the vmkernel can decide to do. If you absolutely need to make sure certain vm's have higher priority than others, then you can use shares, so a vm or a resource pool has higher priority for CPU cycles than another vm or resource pool.

-KjB

VMware vExpert

vExpert/VCP/VCAP vmwise.com / @vmwise -KjB
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