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Capacity/CPU planning for VMWAre new hosts
Hey all, not sure if this is the best place for this but figured I would start here.
Current environment
We currently have 2 ESX hosts connected to a SAN
Total # of hosts - 2
Total # of cores - 16 (2 x Intel X5550 per host, so 8 cores per host)
Total # of VMs - 20 (10 on each host)
Total # of vCPUs - 44 (total for both hosts, some VMs have 2 vCPUs, some have 1 vCPU, some have 4 vCPUs, some have 8 vCPUs)
We are seeing some performance issues which could be due to CPUs but also drives (which are 7200rpm drives in Raid 6)
CPU usage is at 20-35% for 80% of the day and 50-60% for the other 20% of the day
We also have 4 Physical servers with a total of 42 cores (all servers are ~ 5 years old), some performance issues likely due to a combo of CPU/disks
New environment plans
Question is regarding the new environment, I am planning on purchasing 1-2 new hosts with 2 x Intel E5-2697v3 CPUs (so 28 cores in each host, which I think equates to 56 threads, latest generation), each server will also have 256GB DDR4 memory
I am reading that the latest generation of CPUs are awesome and handles CPU usage much better
That being said.....I don't know how to calculate # of cores to vCPUs, how does that work? How many vCPUs equal 1 core/thread?
Secondly, I plan on converting the physical servers into VMs.
Will the CPUs that I purchased be sufficient? I am thinking of splitting up the VMs and physical servers 50/50 on to the two new hosts, but I may want to actually put everything on one host and have the second for failover using Veeam or Unitrends. Note that in either case both hosts will be at the same time connected to the same switches.
Thanks
Current environment
We currently have 2 ESX hosts connected to a SAN
Total # of hosts - 2
Total # of cores - 16 (2 x Intel X5550 per host, so 8 cores per host)
Total # of VMs - 20 (10 on each host)
Total # of vCPUs - 44 (total for both hosts, some VMs have 2 vCPUs, some have 1 vCPU, some have 4 vCPUs, some have 8 vCPUs)
We are seeing some performance issues which could be due to CPUs but also drives (which are 7200rpm drives in Raid 6)
CPU usage is at 20-35% for 80% of the day and 50-60% for the other 20% of the day
We also have 4 Physical servers with a total of 42 cores (all servers are ~ 5 years old), some performance issues likely due to a combo of CPU/disks
New environment plans
Question is regarding the new environment, I am planning on purchasing 1-2 new hosts with 2 x Intel E5-2697v3 CPUs (so 28 cores in each host, which I think equates to 56 threads, latest generation), each server will also have 256GB DDR4 memory
I am reading that the latest generation of CPUs are awesome and handles CPU usage much better
That being said.....I don't know how to calculate # of cores to vCPUs, how does that work? How many vCPUs equal 1 core/thread?
Secondly, I plan on converting the physical servers into VMs.
Will the CPUs that I purchased be sufficient? I am thinking of splitting up the VMs and physical servers 50/50 on to the two new hosts, but I may want to actually put everything on one host and have the second for failover using Veeam or Unitrends. Note that in either case both hosts will be at the same time connected to the same switches.
Thanks
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It's a rule of thumb, we've been using for over 17 years! (average!).
HT does not slow things down.
Do not be concerned with CPU, make sure you have enough RAM and Disk IOPS.
Lots of different VMs, SQL, Exchange, Oracle, Terminal Servers, Citrix Servers, VDI, Workstations.
I would not use RAID 50, I would not use SSDs. I would use 10k or 15k SAS disks, in RAID 10 or RAID 6.
No limit per VM in memory.
HT does not slow things down.
Do not be concerned with CPU, make sure you have enough RAM and Disk IOPS.
Lots of different VMs, SQL, Exchange, Oracle, Terminal Servers, Citrix Servers, VDI, Workstations.
I would not use RAID 50, I would not use SSDs. I would use 10k or 15k SAS disks, in RAID 10 or RAID 6.
No limit per VM in memory.
ASKER
Hi Andrew, why no ssds or raid 50? Aren't ssds supposed to make things go insanely fast? And isn't raid 6 super slow?
I also posted this topic on vmware forums and someone there said that HT slows things down...
I also posted this topic on vmware forums and someone there said that HT slows things down...
RAID 50 is no longer considered appropriate for enterprise installations.
It depends how you use your SSDs, most VMware Admins, that try and use them, when used in RAID are surprised they are slower than SAS in RAID.
As detailed here on EE.
Did they give any actually performance statistics as to how much it slows the host down by.....
We have Hyperthreading - Active on all our installations.
Also important to configure you servers, not to use CPU power management!
Page 21....
If the hardware and BIOS support hyper-threading, ESXi automatically makes use of it. For the best performance we recommend that you enable hyper-threading,
Source
Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere® 5.5 VMware ESXi™ 5.5 vCenter™ Server 5.5
It depends how you use your SSDs, most VMware Admins, that try and use them, when used in RAID are surprised they are slower than SAS in RAID.
As detailed here on EE.
Did they give any actually performance statistics as to how much it slows the host down by.....
We have Hyperthreading - Active on all our installations.
Also important to configure you servers, not to use CPU power management!
Page 21....
If the hardware and BIOS support hyper-threading, ESXi automatically makes use of it. For the best performance we recommend that you enable hyper-threading,
Source
Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere® 5.5 VMware ESXi™ 5.5 vCenter™ Server 5.5
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ASKER
Also, I am reading that enabling Hyper Threading slows things down a bit? Is that true? And if you dont enable HT then you don't get the extra threads (2 threads per core)?
In your example of 5-6 VMs per core, how many vCPUs are they total? Are any of them SQL or semi heavy use application servers?
The new servers will have a combo of SSDs in Raid 50 and 12GB/s SAS 10k RPM drives in Raid 10...thats why I think ALL the VMs from both old hosts will hit in a single new host...thoughts?
We have Ess Plus licensing, I understand that we can only get 8vCPUs per VM, is there a limit on memory per VM?
Thanks