Preface

Welcome to vSphere High Performance Cookbook. In this book, we will teach you how to tune and grow a VMware vSphere 5 Infrastructure. This book will provide you with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to build and run a high-performing VMware vSphere virtual infrastructure. Also, we will look at the detailed, step-by-step coverage, with screenshots that are usually not available in product manuals.

You will learn how to configure and manage ESXi CPU, memory, networking, and storage for sophisticated, enterprise-scale environments. Also, you will learn how to manage changes to the vSphere environment, and optimize the performance of all vSphere components.

This book focuses on high value and often overlooked performance-related topics, such as NUMA Aware CPU Scheduler, VMM Scheduler, Core Sharing, the Virtual Memory Reclamation technique, Checksum offloading, VM DirectPath I/O, queuing on storage array, command queuing, vCenter Server design, and virtual machine and application tuning.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, CPU Performance Design, covers VMM Scheduler, Cache aware CPU Scheduler, Hyperthreaded Core Sharing, Ready Time (%RDY), and so on.

Chapter 2, Memory Performance Design, covers virtual memory reclamation technique, how to rightly size a VM's memory, monitoring host ballooning, swapping activity, and so on.

Chapter 3, Networking Performance Design, covers different vSwitch load balancing, options consideration for checksum offloading, VMDirectPath I/O, NetQueue, SplitRx mode for multicast traffic, Multi NIC vMotion, NIOC, and so on.

Chapter 4, DRS, SDRS, and Resource Control Design, covers the DRS algorithm, resource pool guidelines, SIOC threshold considerations, profile driven storage, SDRS and its affinity/anti-affinity rules, and so on.

Chapter 5, vSphere Cluster Design, covers considerations for scale up and scale out cluster design, FT and its caveats, application monitoring, DPM, Host affinity/anti-affinity rules, and so on.

Chapter 6, Storage Performance Design, covers how to design vSphere storage based on various workloads, how you design iSCSI, FC storage for best performance, considerations for VAAI, and so on.

Chapter 7, Designing vCenter and vCenter Database for Best Performance, covers what platform to choose when designing your vCenter Server, redundant vCenter design, vCenter design for highly-available Auto Deploy, vCenter SSO and its deployment, and so on.

Chapter 8, Virtual Machine and Application Performance Design, covers how to select the best time synchronization in virtual machines, considerations for Virtual NUMA, VM swapfile placement best practices and its impact, and so on.

What you need for this book

You need VMware vSphere 5.1, which includes, VMware vSphere ESXi, vCenter Server, any SSH Client (Putty), and vSphere Client.

Who this book is for

This book is a valuable addition for technical professionals with system administration skills and some VMware experience who wish to learn about advanced optimization and the configuration features and functions of vSphere 5.1.

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