The above title is a horrible attempt at a Forest Gump reference.
Either way - Novell announces support for VMWare's Virtual Machine Interface - which allows Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 Service Pack 2's kernel to have "increased performance and better interoperability".
Think of it this way - there will be preferred OS's to virtualize - Novell says you can virtualize Suse since its just x86 virtualization but if you do SLES 10SP2 - you can get VMI support.
In the paravirtualization space - this will mean increased density, better running VM's, better running ESX hosts, etc.
In other words - "the guest operating system is modified to work more closely with the underlying hardware and not just with the virtualized environment."
And its a brand differentiator as well - the OS and the VM platform both have to be tuned or tunable - and with VMI - VMWare is saying they are prepared to virtualize an OS like SUSE better than its competitors.
Showing posts with label performance bottlenecks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label performance bottlenecks. Show all posts
Monday, June 16, 2008
Monday, June 9, 2008
Killer VMs on the loose.
I have been hearing more and more about the "Killer VMs" - think of this as the lovechild of Virtualization and the industry term "Killer Apps".
Wikipedia has it as "is an application so compelling that someone will buy the hardware or software components necessary to run it."
Basically virtualize the "Killer App" and its becomes the "Killer VM".
This will make you visible, put your name on the map, your CIO will thank you, your CEO may even wave at you once in recognition of your stellar service.
Don't get cocky. These "Killer Apps" often have problems and are the application server than when it hiccups, goes down, causing your business pain and makes everyone go "We really should do something about that" but no one does.
Alot of IT departments may spend a ton of money on Active/Passive Clustering, etc - remember its a favorite child, it may get all sorts of resources, dollars spent on it, trying to ensure application SLA's or increase its uptime and performance.
I have seen new servers, more memory, faster CPUs, even SAN's purchased to manage "Killer Apps".
I have seen investment in high-end clustering, low-end clustering for "Killer Apps" - when at the end of the day the "Killer App" may just be a Windows 2000 Server running SQL with an application that is mission critical.
Enter VMWare, enter DRS, VMotion, HA, etc and you pick up some amazing tools to manage these "Killer Apps" and they become "Killer VMs".
Mark Brunnel writes about putting Navision and SQL 2005 into a VM, and had the v-piphany (virtualization epiphany):
"It is amazing to see VMWare running and the management and failover capabilities. For me it means the end of active passive clusters."
Mark's done some rough benchmarking and found that "VMWare is just slightly slower in posting but only 5% maximum." that's compared to the application running in Windows.
More and more people are going past their initial P2V consolidation effors, alot more are building VMs without every having a physical server, and now folks are optimizing environments, in this 2nd or 3rd phase of Virtualization, the Killer VMs are going to start showing up - these VMs will be more important than some others, require more attention, more care and feeding and better capacity management of the resources.
No CIO is going to like to hear that a VM used by 10 people took down a "Killer VM".
No CIO wants to hear that you could have prevented it but hadn't rolled out Resource Pools yet or don't have the right systems management tools to manage/monitor resource utilization.
Wikipedia has it as "is an application so compelling that someone will buy the hardware or software components necessary to run it."
Basically virtualize the "Killer App" and its becomes the "Killer VM".
This will make you visible, put your name on the map, your CIO will thank you, your CEO may even wave at you once in recognition of your stellar service.
Don't get cocky. These "Killer Apps" often have problems and are the application server than when it hiccups, goes down, causing your business pain and makes everyone go "We really should do something about that" but no one does.
Alot of IT departments may spend a ton of money on Active/Passive Clustering, etc - remember its a favorite child, it may get all sorts of resources, dollars spent on it, trying to ensure application SLA's or increase its uptime and performance.
I have seen new servers, more memory, faster CPUs, even SAN's purchased to manage "Killer Apps".
I have seen investment in high-end clustering, low-end clustering for "Killer Apps" - when at the end of the day the "Killer App" may just be a Windows 2000 Server running SQL with an application that is mission critical.
Enter VMWare, enter DRS, VMotion, HA, etc and you pick up some amazing tools to manage these "Killer Apps" and they become "Killer VMs".
Mark Brunnel writes about putting Navision and SQL 2005 into a VM, and had the v-piphany (virtualization epiphany):
"It is amazing to see VMWare running and the management and failover capabilities. For me it means the end of active passive clusters."
Mark's done some rough benchmarking and found that "VMWare is just slightly slower in posting but only 5% maximum." that's compared to the application running in Windows.
More and more people are going past their initial P2V consolidation effors, alot more are building VMs without every having a physical server, and now folks are optimizing environments, in this 2nd or 3rd phase of Virtualization, the Killer VMs are going to start showing up - these VMs will be more important than some others, require more attention, more care and feeding and better capacity management of the resources.
No CIO is going to like to hear that a VM used by 10 people took down a "Killer VM".
No CIO wants to hear that you could have prevented it but hadn't rolled out Resource Pools yet or don't have the right systems management tools to manage/monitor resource utilization.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
Want awesome performance in VMWARE ESX?
Of course! we all do! So let's talk about how to get there. To achieve stellar VMware ESX performance you have to remove ALL bottlenecks in your environment. Remember your performance will only be as fast as the slowest "link" in your performance equation.
Here is the list to start removing performance bottlenecks:
1. Make sure that all of your hosts have sufficient RAM and do not over commit on memory utilization. If your workloads force the host to start swapping memory to disk, kiss your performance goodbye. There is a huge difference in speed between accessing memory internally and doing physical i/o to disk!
2. Make sure your CPU is not over utilized. Checks the processor ready queue to see how long threads are waiting to run. Extended period of time indicates a problem. Also check the overall processor utilization over a week or a month. Keep the overall utilization under 80%
3. As you scale up your ESX environment you will run into disk i/o bottlenecks. Make sure that you places your most mission critical VMs on the fastest storage available to you
4. Understand the timing of your workloads to identify when or if constraints develop in memory utilization, cpu, and disk i/o. Spread out the workloads by changing when they run i.e timing or move workloads to different hosts to mix it up.
Here is the list to start removing performance bottlenecks:
1. Make sure that all of your hosts have sufficient RAM and do not over commit on memory utilization. If your workloads force the host to start swapping memory to disk, kiss your performance goodbye. There is a huge difference in speed between accessing memory internally and doing physical i/o to disk!
2. Make sure your CPU is not over utilized. Checks the processor ready queue to see how long threads are waiting to run. Extended period of time indicates a problem. Also check the overall processor utilization over a week or a month. Keep the overall utilization under 80%
3. As you scale up your ESX environment you will run into disk i/o bottlenecks. Make sure that you places your most mission critical VMs on the fastest storage available to you
4. Understand the timing of your workloads to identify when or if constraints develop in memory utilization, cpu, and disk i/o. Spread out the workloads by changing when they run i.e timing or move workloads to different hosts to mix it up.
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