vSphere High Performance Essentials

If you're a system administrator who has some experience with VMware vSphere but would like a quick guide to be able to identify and fix performance issues in your vSphere systems, then this book is for you.

Improve the performance of VMware vSphere using this fast-paced guide

About This Book

Design, configure, and monitor your virtual landscape to run performance-intensive workloads
Implement a reliable and high-performance network for virtual infrastructures with confidence.
Investigate and eliminate virtual machine performance issues

What You Will Learn

Choose the right hardware and server components suitable for high-performance scenarios
Adopt availability and automatic load-balancing in your virtual infrastructure
Understand and monitor CPU and memory resources
Monitor performance on the vCenter, ESXi, and virtual machine levels
Configure storage resources to achieve greater performance
Incorporate latency and performance sensible networking
Tune and tweak common guest operating systems

In Detail

VMware vSphere is all the components and operating system that comes together to make VMware's enterprise virtualization platform unique. When running enterprise-driven application workloads, the VMware vSphere family has become a preference of many developers. The vSphere platform is designed to work with numerous servers and infrastructure core components to create virtualized platforms and/or a complete cloud computing fabrics.

This book will guide you through tuning, tweaking, and optimizing vSphere in order to improve the performance of your systems. It will also help you identify and fix common performance bottlenecks.

Starting with planning high-performance infrastructure setups, the book covers the core concepts of cluster setups such as resource pools, DRS, and availability options, along with CPU virtualization concepts. Next, it covers the management of physical and virtual memory mechanisms, swapping, and ballooning.

Moving on, you'll get an understanding of how vCenter Server can assist you with recognizing performance issues, and how to utilize advanced technologies such as Storage I/O Control and vSphere Flash Read Cache to tune storage resources. Next, you'll learn to implement a reliable and high-performance network for virtual infrastructures.

Finally, the book shows you how esxtop and resxtop can provide advanced metrics to detect performance issues, and how you can optimize storage and network resources inside virtual machines.

Style and approach

This book is a step-by-step guide, but at a fast pace. It explains high-performing VMware vSphere infrastructure setups and workloads through real-world examples.