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vSphere High Performance Cookbook
vSphere High Performance Cookbook

vSphere High Performance Cookbook: A cookbook is the ideal way to learn a tool as complex as vSphere. Through experiencing the real-world recipes in this tutorial you'll gain deep insight into vSphere's unique attributes and reach a high level of proficiency.

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vSphere High Performance Cookbook

Chapter 2. Memory Performance Design

In this chapter, we will cover the tasks related to memory performance design. You will learn the following aspects of memory performance design:

  • Virtual memory reclamation techniques

  • Monitoring host-swapping activity

  • Monitoring host-ballooning activity

  • Keeping memory free for VMkernel

  • Key memory performance metrics to monitor

  • What metrics not to use

  • Identifying when memory is the problem

  • Analyzing host and VM memory

  • Memory performance best practices

Introduction


Although VMware vSphere uses various mechanisms to efficiently allocate memory, you might still encounter a situation where virtual machines are allocated insufficient physical memory.

You should know how to monitor memory usage of both the host and virtual machines. You should also know how to troubleshoot common memory performance problems, such as those involving an excessive demand for memory.

Virtual memory reclamation techniques


Virtual machines perform memory allocation in the same way, as an operating system handles memory allocation and deallocation. The guest operating system frees itself from a piece of physical memory by adding the memory page numbers to the guest free list.

The guest operating system free list is not accessible to the hypervisor and thus it is difficult for the hypervisor to know when to free host physical memory and when the guest physical memory is freed. The hypervisor is completely unaware of which pages are free or allocated in the guest operating system, and because of this the hypervisor cannot reclaim host physical memory when the guest operating system frees guest physical memory.

So VMware hypervisor relies on memory reclamation techniques to reclaim the host physical memory that is freed by the guest operating system. The memory reclamation techniques are:

  • Transparent page sharing

  • Memory ballooning

  • Host-level (or hypervisor) swapping

Getting ready...

Monitoring host-swapping activity


Excessive memory demand can cause severe performance problems for one or more virtual machines on an ESXi host. When ESXi is actively swapping from the memory of a virtual machine to disk, the performance of that virtual machine will degrade. The overhead of swapping a virtual machine's memory to disk can also degrade the performance of other virtual machines, because the virtual machine expects to be writing to RAM (speeds measured in nanoseconds) but it is unknowingly writing to disk (speeds measured in milliseconds).

The metrics in the vSphere Client for monitoring swapping activity are the following:

  • Memory Swap In rate: The rate at which memory is being swapped in from disk.

  • Memory Swap Out rate: The rate at which memory is being swapped out to disk.

  • Swapped: The total amount of data that is sitting inside the .vswp hypervisor-level swap file. However, this doesn't tell you anything about the current state of performance, nor about the current state of...

Monitoring host-ballooning activity


Ballooning is a part of normal operations when memory is overcommitted. The fact that ballooning occurrence is not necessarily an indication of a performance problem. The use of the balloon driver enables the guest to give up physical memory pages that are not being used. In fact, ballooning can be a sign that you're getting extra value out of the memory you have in the host.

However, if ballooning causes the guest to give up memory that it actually needs, performance problems can occur due to guest operating system paging.

Note, however, that this is fairly uncommon because the guest operating system will always assign already-free memory to the balloon driver whenever possible, thereby avoiding any guest operating system swapping.

In the vSphere Client, use the Memory Balloon metric to monitor a host's ballooning activity. This metric represents the total amount of memory claimed by the balloon drivers of the virtual machines on the host. The memory claimed...

Keeping memory free for VMkernel


The amount of memory the VMkernel will try to keep free can be achieved through the Mem.MemMinFreePct parameter. MemMinFreePct determines the amount of memory that the VMkernel should keep free. vSphere 4.1 introduced a dynamic threshold of the Soft, Hard, and Low state to set appropriate thresholds and prevent virtual machine performance issues, while protecting VMkernel. The different states, based on %pRAM which is still free, determines what type of memory reclamation techniques are being used.

For MemMinFreePct, using a default value of 6 percent can be inefficient when 256 gigabyte or 512 gigabyte systems are becoming more and more mainstream. A 6 percent threshold on a 512 gigabyte results in 30 gigabyte idling most of the time. However, not all customers use large systems; some prefer to scale out rather than to scale up. In this scenario, a 6 percent MemMinFreePct might be suitable. To have the best of both worlds, VMkernel uses a sliding scale to...

Key memory performance metrics to monitor


To troubleshoot memory performance in a VMware vSphere environment, you should monitor the memory performance very carefully. In this aspect you should monitor the following metrics:

  • Average memory active: Memory estimated to be used based on recently touched memory pages.

  • Average memory swapped in or out: Virtual memory swapped to or from disk.

  • Average memory swapped: Total amount of memory swapped out. This indicates a possibility (with an unknown likelihood) of poor performance in the future.

Getting ready

To step through this recipe, you will need a running ESXi Server, a couple of running memory-hungry Virtual Machines, and a working installation of vSphere Client. No other prerequisites are required.

How to do it...

To spot the average Active Memory, you should check both the VM level and Host level. To monitor at the VM level, you should perform the following steps:

  1. Open up vSphere Client.

  2. Log in to the vCenter Server.

  3. On the Home screen, select VMs...

What metrics not to use


A lot of the time, we assume that some very popular metric would be better to monitor memory performance. However, many a times, it leads to something else. This means that these are not an indication of a memory performance issue. If this metric is combined with something else then it may indicate performance degradation.

In this aspect you should not use two of the most popular metrics just to understand whether memory is under pressure or not:

  • Mem.consumed (Consumed Memory)

  • Mem.vmmemctl (Ballooned Memory)

Let me show you what they essentially indicate.

Mem.consumed is the amount of memory consumed by one or all virtual machines. This is calculated as memory granted minus memory saved by sharing. Now the question is why we should not use this. The reason is that memory allocation will vary dynamically based on the VM's entitlement. It is important that a VM should get whatever it actually demands.

Similarly, Mem.vmmemctl is the amount of ballooned memory. This does not...

Identifying when memory is the problem


Both your host memory and VM memory can indicate that it is under pressure. But the main challenge to a VMware admin is how to determine that there is a memory performance issue.

There are a few things which a VMware admin should understand is that there could be a memory performance issue and those are:

  • Your host memory consumption is approaching your total host memory

  • Active memory in your host is approaching your total memory

  • Ballooning is occurring

  • Host swapping is occurring

Now, if you wonder what is Active memory here in relation to Consumed memory, let me tell you that Active Memory is the amount of memory that is actively used, as estimated by VMkernel based on recently touched memory pages. For a VM this is referred to the amount of guest "physical" memory actively used.

An ESXi host calculates Active memory by using the sum of all active metrics for all powered-on virtual machines plus vSphere services on the host.

There could be another side to it...

Analyzing host and VM memory


Often you need to monitor virtual machine and host memory usage; the good part about this is that VMware vSphere Client exposes two memory statistics in the Summary tab of a virtual machine. These are consumed host memory and active guest memory.

Consumed host memory is the amount of host physical memory that is allocated to the virtual machine. Please note that this value includes the virtualization overhead also.

Also note that many VMs have oversized vRAM, and the guest operating system is likely to opportunistically fill up its vRAM with unnecessary things (for example, caching everything read from disk, no matter how unlikely it will be requested again). Consumed memory only means that the VM used this memory at some point, not that it's likely to use it again.

Active guest memory is defined as the amount of guest physical memory that is currently being used by the guest operating system and its applications.

These two statistics are quite useful for analyzing...

Memory performance best practices


Virtualization causes an increase in the amount of physical memory required, due to the extra memory needed by ESXi for its own code and data structures, and you need to know what are the best practice standards you have.

There are four basic principles, which you should keep in mind:

  • Allocate enough memory to hold the working set of applications that you will run on the virtual machine, thus minimizing swapping. You can estimate the working set by monitoring the Active memory metric.

  • Do not disable the balloon driver

  • Keep transparent page sharing enabled. It's free!

  • Avoid overcommitting memory to the point that it results in heavy memory reclamation, especially non-trivial Swap In rates (KBps).

How to do it…

So you may ask how we can determine the total required datacenter memory.

Well, there are several methods to determine the total memory capacity requirement:

  • Use the information gathered during the current-state analysis to determine the current memory capacity...

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Key benefits

  • Troubleshoot real-world vSphere performance issues and identify their root causes
  • Design and configure CPU, memory, networking, and storage for better and more reliable performance
  • Comprehensive coverage of performance issues and solutions including vCenter Server design and virtual machine and application tuning

Description

VMware vSphere is the key virtualization technology in today's market. vSphere is a complex tool and incorrect design and deployment can create performance-related problems. vSphere High Performance Cookbook is focused on solving those problems as well as providing best practices and performance-enhancing techniques. vSphere High Performance Cookbook offers a comprehensive understanding of the different components of vSphere and the interaction of these components with the physical layer which includes the CPU, memory, network, and storage. If you want to improve or troubleshoot vSphere performance then this book is for you! vSphere High Performance Cookbook will teach you how to tune and grow a VMware vSphere 5 infrastructure. This book focuses on tuning, optimizing, and scaling the infrastructure using the vSphere Client graphical user interface. This book will enable the reader with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to build and run a high-performing VMware vSphere virtual infrastructure. You will learn how to configure and manage ESXi CPU, memory, networking, and storage for sophisticated, enterprise-scale environments. You will also learn how to manage changes to the vSphere environment and optimize the performance of all vSphere components. This book also 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. By the end of this book you will be able to identify, diagnose, and troubleshoot operational faults and critical performance issues in vSphere.

Who is this book for?

The book is primarily written for technical professionals with system administration skills and some VMware experience who wish to learn about advanced optimization and the configuration features and functions for vSphere 5.1.

What you will learn

  • Understand VMM Scheduler, Cache aware CPU Scheduler, NUMA Aware CPU Scheduler, and so on during CPU Performance Design
  • Learn about the virtual memory reclamation technique, monitoring host ballooning, and swapping activity
  • Get to grips with different vSwitch load balancing, considerations for checksum offloading, VMDirectPath I/O, and so on
  • Understand DRS algorithms, resource pool guidelines, SIOC threshold consideration, SDRS and its affinity/anti-affinity rules in DRS, SDRS, and resource control design
  • Scale up and scale out cluster design for performance, FT and its caveats, application monitoring, DPM, host affinity/anti-affinity rules
  • Design your vSphere storage based on various workloads and FC storage for best performance
  • Choose the right platform while designing your vCenter Server, redundant vCenter design, vCenter SSO and its deployment

Product Details

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Publication date : Jul 26, 2013
Length: 240 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782170013
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Product Details

Publication date : Jul 26, 2013
Length: 240 pages
Edition : 1st
Language : English
ISBN-13 : 9781782170013
Vendor :
VMware
Category :
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Tools :

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Table of Contents

8 Chapters
CPU Performance Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Memory Performance Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Networking Performance Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
DRS, SDRS, and Resource Control Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
vSphere Cluster Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Storage Performance Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Designing vCenter and vCenter Database for Best Performance Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Virtual Machine and Application Performance Design Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

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J. Walker Dec 23, 2013
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
I am working on a environment that is under extremely high stress in terms of CPU, network, memory, and IO performance. We moved it from all physical machines to VMs recently. Initially, the VMs could not handle the stress. The suggestions in this book, especially for IO, CPU, and Memory improved the performance enough to allow the VMs to handle the stress adequately.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Lee Marzke Oct 31, 2013
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Packt provided me a copy of this new book to review on my blog site [...] In summary the book provides a lot of good information I've not seen elsewhere on setting up Performance graphs and improving memory and network performance. To read the entire review see: [...]
Amazon Verified review Amazon
SLJ Johnson Oct 24, 2014
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Personally I really enjoy cookbooks as they're condensed specific books which focus on the stuff you're after. Less platitudinal vendor nonsense and just the facts on how to make stuff a bit better than OOTB.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Larry Karnis Aug 22, 2013
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Had a quick look through the book and am impressed. The scope and depth of detail in the book is great. Gets right to the point, explains the issue and tells you what to do to make things better/faster/etc. Explains trade offs (when choices available) as well as things to watch out for. Lots of actionable suggestions.You could probably find most/all of the same information by finding/reading VMware blogs. This book saves a lot of time (and filters out a lot of blog 'noise') so it is worth the money.FYI - this is not a book for beginners. You should be a solid VMware administrator (VCP or equivalent skills/experience).
Amazon Verified review Amazon
VirtuallyMikeB Oct 28, 2013
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Good day,Packt Publishing was gracious enough to give me a free e-copy of the book to review. I reviewed it on my blog at VirtuallyMikeBrown dot com. I've included the full text of my review below.-------------------------------------------I was graciously given the opportunity to read and review vSphere High Performance Cookbook, written by Prasenjit Sarkar (@stretchcloud) and published by Packt Publishing, whose subtitle states it has Over 60 recipes to help you improve vSphere performance and solve problems before they arise. Gulping down its chapters was easy after seeing that Prasenjit's recipes included fixes for such common, and some not so common, misconfigurations or lack thereof.The book states its audience includes technical professionals with vSphere administration experience that want to use advanced options and configurations to optimize their environments. The vSphere platform used in the book is 5.1. As I was reading, I kept wanting to give the book to the VMware admins I've come across to help them improve their deployments because I know how much they could use the recipes inside. In my varied VMware experiences, I've come across many of the topics presented in the book. I know first-hand how useful they can be and how often they go unnoticed or are left unconfigured.The chapter list includes the following topics:CPU Performance DesignMemory Performance DesignNetworking Performance DesignDRS, SDRS, and Resource Control DesignvSphere Cluster DesignStorage Performance DesignDesigning vCenter and vCenter Database for Best PerformanceVirtual Machine and Application Performance DesignThese topics are foundational in building out a vSphere environment for the best performance. I'm reminded of a live-blog post by Scott Lowe (@scott_lowe) during VMworld 2010 timeframe, if I remember right, where then-VMware CEO Paul Maritz stated there were about 800,000 VMware Administrators and about 60,000 of them were VCPs. I know these numbers have changed since then, but what this says to me is that the large majority of IT folks with their hands in a vSphere infrastructure have not taken the formal VCP training which happens to cover a lot of the topics in this book. In my experience, most VMware administrators are not virtualization folks; they're traditional Microsoft server folks that have been forced to work in a virtualized environment because that's how the technology train has rolled. They're not dumb, of course, but they sure could use some pointers in how to better manage and optimize a vSphere infrastructure. This book focuses on optimization and does a fine job.Common topics such as understanding %RDY, memory reclamation, swapping, vSwitch load balancing, multi-NIC vMotion, resource pool guidelines, affinity/anti-affinity rules, scale up vs. scale out, considerations for iSCSI and FC storage, which platforms to choose for a vCenter Server, SSO, and NUMA considerations are just a few of those covered in this cookbook. There are also more advanced topics covered I wasn't even aware of, such as modifying CPU scheduler options for processor topology and cache awareness.As we study and gain experience with vSphere, we hear about these topics in different capacities, but this book brings the topics together to focus on how to improve performance. Each topic includes an introduction to the concept followed by a section on what you need in a test lab to follow the recipe in the cookbook style. Through screenshots, graphs and tables, you're then shown how to perform the task. And finally, how the concept works is explained, perhaps with additional material to round out the topic.In addition, attention grabbing performance-enhancing topics includeSpotting CPU over commitmentWhat is most important to monitor in CPU performanceKey memory performance metrics to monitorIdentifying when memory is the problemMemory performance best practicesImproving network performance using network I/O controlUsing resource pool guidelinesDesigning a highly available and high-performance iSCSI SANDesigning a highly available and high-performance FC SANIf you're like me, you know a VMware admin or two that could benefit from reading this book. Thanks again to Packt Publishing for the opportunity to review this book. A free, digital copy was provided to me for doing so.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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