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Pisapatis
Contributor
Contributor

Mix of production and non-production VMs - seeking for performance lab paper

Hi, I have been challenged for a proof point  that VMs on a single vSphere host will be equally served as if they are separated as physical servers. Is there a lab paper that can prove that? I am asked on planning for a mix of production and non-production VMs on the same VMware host. If I run a performance work-load on a bunch of non-production VMs, does it impact other VMs that are running production system?

Please help me with some proof points.

Thanks,

SP

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tedg_vCrumbs
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Enthusiast

Lets discuss this in terms of CPU and Memory.

Your VM's will not consume more than the allocated set of resources.  If you over provision the physical resources of the box you could have "noisy neighbor" issues.  But living within the physical resources of the host is not exactly efficient use of the hardware.  So how do we over provision the box and make sure one VM or a pool or VM's are not impacting others under contention?

Shares and Resource Pools.

You can separate your performance testing servers from your production servers using Resource Pools and assigning a higher share value to the production pool.

Or if you are just worried about VM's elbowing each other, a single Resource Pool where all VM's get the same share value would accomplish that as well.

Now keep in mind that Resource Pools are often a source of frustration and performance degradation when not implemented correctly.  I must urge caution when using.  A very good understanding of Resource Pools is required prior to implementing.

http://www.virtualizationadmin.com/articles-tutorials/vmware-esx-and-vsphere-articles/performance-tu...

Understanding Resource Pools in VMware vSphere - Wahl Network

vSphere 5.5 Documentation Center

Resource Pools are covered very well in here as well.

http://www.amazon.com/VMware-vSphere-Clustering-Deepdive-Volume/dp/1478183411

I don't have a paper per say but this scenario of production and testing Resource Pools is always covered in examples when explaining Resource Pools or shares.

------ tedg Don't forget to mark posts as helpful or correct if they deserve it!
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