SQL performance

This talk was created because of persistent misconceptions that virtualization is unfit for and hurts the performance of SQL RDBM's (though this talk is about MS SQL a lot of it can be generalized to be used for other IO intensive workloads as well).







Problem is a reduction in storage spindles is one source of performance problems. Queues can also be a problem.

Sequential reads drop when there are more hosts added to your vmfs volume.





One way to fix this is to set memory reservations.





This pitfall is someone using the hosted product and creating a misconception about ESX.

Newer procs are always better. Decrease in pipeline lengths and increase in caches.





Dell's DVD store is a great benchmarking tool.









Servers that had multiple SQL instances are best broken down in multiple VM's.

When doing PoC's ensure you use target HW for correct modelling.

There is a white paper on VMware.com about this topic.

CapacityIQ

The obligatory statement that what's being discussed is conceptual and may not be the same as the end product starts off the talk..





The problem this tools tries to address; Basically we tend to overprovision because we don't have the right tools to predict better.

Virtualization obviously helps in this area.








There are multiple considerations in virtuality
- resource dependencies
- workload mobility
- Cpu and memory optimizations (memory ballooning)
- storage optimizations (thin provisioning linked clones)





The key is that the envirornment is dynamic.

Again SLA's are key and need to be guarded.




The architecture:












Do what if scenarios. Capacity dashboard





You can set alert triggers, fi send me an email when capacity reaches 80%.





Example of a whatif report




The focus is on intelligent planning using trending and it gives tools to optimize your current environment by identifying idle VM's f.i.



How the products work together.

Virtualization Optimization Capacity Mgmt best practices SAS institute

This session was on best practices re: virtualization Capacity Planning, as per experience of SAS institute.

Some of their findings:
- Memory is more important than CPU
- Memory tracking is important

They started very conservative (as most when new to virtualization) and started with a ratio of 11:1. They then used the SAS tool to track performance and behaviors and from the statistics were able to gather that they weren't using their virtual infrastructure optimally. They the determined that they could increase their consolidation ratio; from 11:1 to 20:1.

The tool name is: SAS IT intelligence for VMware VI.

Along the way they also discovered that the CPU ready measurement is an important measurement to track.

vCenter Orchestrator introduction

Where does it fit in the overall picture?



Now let's define automation and orchestration



We want to do this because we want to drive down operational costs.






The architecture





It is also extensible through a Java API.

Some of the use cases:

The Cannes scenery

Just a few pictures shot on the way from the hotel to the Palais du Festivals.





A sculpture on the beach, aparently by someone looking to make a few Euros that way.

VMware unplugged

Some of the questions asked.



The VMware executive team answering Questions from the audience.

1. What is VMware doing to stay ahead from the competitions?
A: the battle is not on the hypervisor but the complete system to get everything to work together. VMware is still 3y ahead. MS is only now catching up with windows 2008 R2

2. How much will vSphere cost?
A: laughter, will be announced closer to GA date. Pricing and product will be more localized

3. What about citrix's announcement
A: PM; giving away something for free is an indication of lack of sstreength. VMware invests a lot in R&D

4: what about amazon c3
A: PM most offerings are for smaller web presence. Does not scale well due to lack of features

5. Oracle support and licensing, what is VMware it about it.
A: VMware us helping vendors to certify. Vendors are now certifying VA's. Oracle is still reluctant to provide support. In general licensing per socket, common in the industry will need to change, but it will take time.

6. Does the intel partnership have implications for AMD relationship?
A: no, it's not exclusive

7. Innovation will that continue to receive focus?
A: yes, but also increased focus on improvement execution.

8. How about the ease of moving from Xen to to VMware
A: will be looked into

9. What about announcements of release dates for budgetting purposes?
A: PM apologizes and promises improvement in the future.

10. What is the future of the service console?
A: there is now VIMA for that.

11. Will there be a move to have java and .net run natively?
A: that is indeed a direction being looked at.

12. What about competition between partners and VMware
A: MC this should not happen talk to him about it to resolve this.

vCenter config control

This session gave an overview of a coming product. No demos or even screen shots. It seems to be the layer that ties together products like Update Manager and host profiles. It tries to align with the configuration process in ITIL yet is only a subset dealing with virtual infra chiefly.

VMworld Keynote 2

The day starts with the second keynote where the new vSphere will be presented in all it's technical detail, by Stephen Herrod.





It started out with showing some interesting statistics to show that VM's have scaled from machine for low to medium intensive workloads all the way up to high resource intensive workloads. Especially the advances that have been made in IOPS, where a 3.5 infrastructure allows 100K IOPS the new vSphere will now support >200K IOPS and memory is brought up to 256GB. Some serious numbers allowing some serious workloads to be run. Another interesting point was the fact that virtualization allows us to really unlock the CPU horsepower as becomes evident when we take the example of a web farm.



This point is further underlined in the following slide, which shows the amount of mailboxes you can run on 1 server running the application on a single OS as opposed to running multiple OS images on the same server.



The VMsafe API is now a real product (well when vSphere is released). McAfee will have a product and others will follow. This being an example of what is possible when having a hypervisor in between the OS and the hardware having complete visibility of all IO events the app and subsequently the OS generates and providing the abilitiy to use that data for auditing purposes f.i.



The presentation then moved on to the possibilities of Cloud capabilities where the point was that a lot of engineering effort is going in the R&D necessary to make sure that workload can securely roam across federated clouds.




The vCloud plugin for vCemter was demo-ed, which allows administrators to have an integrated view of external Cloud resources. Allowing you for instance to move an App from your internal infrastructure to the cloud provider's.

On the View side, the PCoIP even 3D is now possible.

Solution Xchange

Just did the rounds at the solution exchange to see what's on offer. A number of interesting developments at Cisco. Of course evryone's itching to get their hands on the nexus 1000v, but Cisco has even bigger plans to dive down further into the virtualization layer in the future. A virtual CNA which would allow processor offloading of network AND storage traffic as well as tagging of traffic right at the VM level that will be understood right throughout your Cisco networking infrastructure paving the way to end to end service management.
Got some explanation from Citrux around what exactly they have released for free. which appears to be their current Enterprise offering but minus HA. Their HA being the level 1 HA product as OEM'ed from Marathon. It does include the XenMotion functionality, which I guess gives them a headstart on Hyper-V release 2 coming with Windows 2008 R2 layer this year.


-- Post From My iPhone

Keynote session 1

After long lines to get into the conference center thenk God someone had the sense to relax security in order to get everyone in on time.




The keynote is opened by the European general manager Mauricio Carli.





Next up of course Paul Maritz




After a bit of history of VMware the scene is set for the Cloud architecture vision of VMware.







And there it is, VMware's evolutionary vision towards cloud computing. The idea is that this addresses a number of things:
- ownership of data, security
- legacy apps, no need to re-write your business apps. You can enter the cloud as-is and possibly migrate slowly to a jeos(pronounced juice, just enough OS).

Next up was a demo of terremark as an example of an external cloud provider.




The above slide summarizes the benefits that an external provider can offer, concisely.

Next up the vision for enterprise user computing.
The idea that is being built on is that the traditional model is device centric but should really be user centric.
To complete the vision that started with VDI, enter the client hypervisor.
This in turn will enable the BYO- PC (bring your own) vision.




Next was sap



Problems with this today:
- billing
- asset management
- can't buy the automation n orchestration layer





To fund this following projects were idnetified to address this:



Config management also an issue.
Here's an idea:

Sales best practices from around the world

IT infra future

The virtual private cloud; mix internal & external cloud. Flex capacity, secure.
New in vCompute:
- power mgmt; from experimental to production ready
- VM directpath; direct access to underlying HW for resources hungry workloads.

Now move to 100% virtualization, no longer need mixed virtual physical management.

Distributed power mgmt saves additional 20% of costs!

Thin provisioning with vStorage with capacity alerting.

vApp selfdescribing applications, multi- tier applications with an OVF descriptor bundled as one unit of management complete with SLA's.

VMware Data Recovery; SMB solution complete with backup capability whereas VCB was just a framework.




-- Post From My iPhone

vCenter AppSpeed

Strong points of Appspeed
- easy to install
- direct innsight into the virtualized environment
- makes PoC's easier





Allows assured migration
- measure the app before the migration
- measure the app after the migration

What does it do?
- maps the environment
- discovers interdependencies between app components
- what is the ensuser performance with these apps
- continually monitor the app
- datacenter performance analysis and trending


Allows the infrastructure owner to become pro-active.