© 2010 VMware Inc. All rights reserved Confidential Performance Tuning for Windows Guest OS IT Pro Camp Presented by: Matthew Mitchell
Dec 16, 2015
© 2010 VMware Inc. All rights reserved
Confidential
Performance Tuning for Windows Guest OS
IT Pro CampPresented by:
Matthew Mitchell
2 Confidential
Agenda Introduction
Understanding VMware Performance
Best Practices of HA and DRS with Windows Guests
Virtual Machine Build out
Windows Guest OS Tuning (DEMO)
Monitoring with vCenter Operations Manager (DEMO)
3 Confidential
Introduction
4 Confidential
Understanding VMware Performance
5 Confidential
Maximum Scalability and Performance with VMware vSphere® 5
Application’s Performance Requirements
% o
f App
licat
ions
95% of Apps Require
IOPS
Network
Memory
CPU
< 10,000
<2.4Mb/s
< 4GB at peak
1 to 2 CPUs
VMware vSphere 4
300,000
30Gb/s
256GB per VM
8 vCPUs
VMware Infrastructure
100,000
9Gb/s
16/64GB per VM
4 vCPUs
VMwarevSphere 5.5
1,000,000
>36Gb/s
1,000GB per VM
64 vCPUs
ESX 2
7,000
.9Gb/s
3.6GB per VM
2 vCPUs
ESX 1
<5,000
<.5Gb/s
2GB per VM
1 vCPUs
3.0/3.5
6 Confidential
Oracle DB Example
CPU
VM
32 vCPU
Oracle DB
2–4 CPU
4% utilized
Memory
VM
1TB
Oracle DB
4–8GB
50% utilized
Disk IO
VM
1,000,000 IOPS
Oracle DB
1200 IOPS
Network IO
VM
36Gb/s
Oracle DB
2 MB/S
Source: VMware Capacity Planner™ analysis of > 700,000 servers in customer production environments
7 Confidential
Best Practices
8 Confidential
Best Practices
Use jumbo frames if possible• Using default settings all vMotions succeeded, however some database
failover was observed. By enabling jumbo frames on vmkernel ports vMotions completed with no database failover using default cluster settings, if jumbo frames are not possible consider adjusting the cluster heartbeat interval.
Increase Cluster Heartbeat Interval• Windows Failover Clustering default heartbeat interval is 1000 ms, consider
increasing to 2000 ms to avoid cluster failover due to application stun during vMotion
Dedicated vMotion Interface• Avoid traversing multiple networking devices and sharing bandwidth with
management traffic by dedicating an interface for use by vMotion traffic, place other interfaces as stand-by to provide redundancy
Use DRS Rules• Create VM to Host “should run on” rules to keep virtual machines on preferred
hosts, but allow to run on non-preferred hosts if required
• Create anti-affinity rules to keep clustered virtual machines on separate hosts
9 Confidential
Troubleshooting Steps
10 Confidential
Virtual Machine Build
11 Confidential
VMware ESX/ESXi Architecture
12 Confidential
Virtual Machine Monitoring
13 Confidential
Virtual Machine Build
vCPU
• CPU Sockets vs. CPU Cores
• Lower overhead with more vSockets than vCores per Socket
• Only use vCores when Windows Licensing does not allow for multi-Socket
Memory
• Start small base memory needs on the OS and Application
• If SSD LUN is available create Virtual Disk for the Windows Swap file there.
Video
• For VDI or Terminal Services you can use the custom settings or if Hardware version 9 you can enable 3D support
• If 3D Support is enabled without Graphic Accelerators Present you will increase ESXi CPU load
14 Confidential
Virtual Machine Build
SCSI Controllers
• There are 4 types of SCSI controllers:
• BusLogic Parallel –This is used mostly for Physical to Virtual Migrations.. If you have this controller it is best to install the latest vmware tools then change to the LSI Logic SAS controller. Also this is the default for Windows 2000 Server
• LSI Logic Parallel – This is the standard boot controller for Windows 2003, Vista, and Linux VMs
• LSI Logic SAS – This is the Default for Windows 2012, Windows 2008, and Windows 7
• VMware Paravirtual – High Performance, High I/O (2000 IOPs and greater) with Lower CPU cost. This is your Tier 1 Controller for Tier 1 Apps running on Win2K3, Win2K8 and 2012 as well as RHEL 5.
15 Confidential
Virtual Machine Build
Network Adapters
• Flexible NIC – This NIC is a P2V Migrated virtual machine configuration. Will cause high CPU overhead.
• E1000 NIC – This is the NIC for older Operating Systems and increases the CPU Load on a Host
• E1000E NIC – This is the Default NIC for Most Windows Based systems for Win2K8, Windows 7, and Windows 2012. Also increase CPU load on the Host
• VMXNET 3 – This is you High Performance NIC there is CPU offload to the Physical NICs as well.. Only issue is the Operating System will not recognize this NIC until Vmware Tools are Loaded.
Floppy Drives
• These are created by default if you do not have a need for these remove for better performance of the virtual machine
USB Controller
• Only install or enable if required for 3rd party applications that have a Dongle Key.. Otherwise leave out
16 Confidential
Virtual Machine Build
Virtual Machine Options
• Memory/CPU Hotplug – Windows 2008 and Windows 2012 operating Systems allow for this Feature
SwapFile Location
• This is normally set to Default which stores the Swap File with the virtual machine.. This makes for a Faster vMotion ability.. If SATA LUNs are presented it is recommended that Swap Files are located there and Monitored closely..
17 Confidential
Non Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) Best Practices
Server Node Size Number of Nodes
4 Socket / 4 Core with 64 GB RAM
4 vCPUs with 8 GB RAM
4
2 Socket / 6 Core with 64 GB RAM
6 vCPUs with 32 GB RAM
2
4 Socket / 2 Core with 128 GB RAM
2 vCPUs with 64 GB RAM
4