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marrowyung

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optimizeing VM

hi,

any guideline on optimizing VM on VMware and Hyper- V  ? how about scale out for VM so that loading can be balance across all VM server?
Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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It's not really clear, what you are trying to achieve, could you expand on your question.
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marrowyung

ASKER

our company has vendor setup the VM but later on we found it is very slow. our contract with Vendor is ended already and they are not going to help us any more, so what is the way to optimize it ? scale it out by forming a VM farm so the loading is load balance between VM nodes?
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Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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There's a lot of pieces to the puzzle.

 - Storage setup (For IOPS or Throughput)
 - Storage to Compute fabric (Latency)
 - VM workloads (RDS Farm, SQL, IIS, SharePoint, ETC)
 - Virtual switch fabric
Andrew Hancock,

"what is the application, what does the VM do?
"

e.g. SQL server.

but what if loading too high, anything let the loading of VM scale out to diff machine and let it serve the same machine ?

Philip,

any SW/tools to detect VM loading contention can be also a good question.

why related to storage setup ?

from your point of view, Hype-V or VMware is better in terms of troubleshoot or load balancing ?
you could scale out and add more VMs but you need to understand WHY is the current VM slow,....

otherwise you'll end up with two slow VMs.

so how is the current VM setup? and how is the host configured ?

Hyper-V or VMware vSphere (ESXi) both the same- terms of troubleshoot or load balancing.
In our experience building standalone and clustered Hyper-V solutions storage tends to be the source of many pain points. So, that's where we'd start.

Another source of pain in the database world is a poorly written database setup where the vendor blames everything else but their setup.

Were performance baselines taken of the workloads while running on the previous system to get an idea of where to go with the new one? Any idea how things were performing on the previous system?
Andrew,

"you could scale out and add more VMs but you need to understand WHY is the current VM slow,...."

I am researching, and how can we monitoring the loading of each VM and what cause it? VMware has the monitoring tools for digging into detail ?


Philip,

"clustered Hyper-V solutions storage tends "

in a clustered Hyper-V, load is balanced between VM host on the SAME system ? e.g. both VM is the same?

"the database world is a poorly written database setup where the vendor blames everything else but their setup."

it is mostly relies on the query programmer wrote !

"Were performance baselines taken of the workloads while running on the previous system to get an idea of where to go with the new one? Any idea how things were performing on the previous system?

I am talking about how to scale it out in case it is slow to understand how VMward and Hyper-V duel with this kind of expanding/enhancement.
tks, actually what is VMware HA, vSphere, VMware vCenter ? what each of them do ?

I am reading this:

http://vinfrastructure.it/2015/01/vmware-vcenter-5-5-design-and-deployment/

it said : "This solution can support from 1 to 1000 Hosts and from 1 to 10,000 VMs, "

what solution can host that ? a single site consist of SSO, VShpere web client, VCenter IS, and vCenter Server.?

for the database server ,what is that? it is a SQL server, MySQL the VM host with ?

multi site support only work since version 5.5 ?
VCenter Server is a management Server which manages ESXi hosts

VMware HA is a function which if a host fails VMs will be restarted automatically on remaining hosts in your cluster
What do you have at present a single Host?

I thought this was about a slow VM?
"VCenter Server is a management Server which manages ESXi hosts"

then I am not sure why VMward HA need VCenter, I  am confused.

"I thought this was about a slow VM?"

I think this can make the question more valuable by focusing on HA and then load balancing. this is a good direction. so what component of VMware give load balance for a VM host farm which host a lot of VM of the same function?

that;s why I list about the VMware component.
If you have a slow VM, VMware HA is not going to help you.

VMware HA is a function which if a host fails, hosting your VM,  the VM will be restarted automatically on remaining hosts in your cluster.

How is this going to increase the performance of your VM ?

vCenter Server IS REQUIRED to configure VMware HA, without vCenter Server which manages your hosts, it's not going to enable VMware HA.

You have still not given us any specifications, of your slow VM, or Host specifications, to help you maybe, increase performance of the VM.

VMware functions, provide you with more resilience, scalability and availability for your VMs, ALL VMs, not a single VM which is performing poorly.

A poor performing VM, will still perform poorly with vCenter Server and VMware HA.

so what component of VMware give load balance for a VM host farm which host a lot of VM of the same function?

None. Load Balancing is performed by features of the OS, not VMware vSphere.

e.g. Microsoft Failover Clustering
"vCenter Server IS REQUIRED to configure VMware HA, without vCenter Server which manages your hosts, it's not going to enable VMware HA."

so VCenter is just like the HA's quorum, which watch out for which one is the primary and which one is slave?

"VMware functions, provide you with more resilience, scalability and availability for your VMs, ALL VMs, not a single VM which is performing poorly.
"
I am sorry, which VMware function provide that?

"e.g. Microsoft Failover Clustering"

I am sorry, that one is not load balancing , it is just a cluster. load balancing means all nodes help each other out to make performance better overall
so VCenter is just like the HA's quorum, which watch out for which one is the primary and which one is slave?

No, VMware vCenter Server is a management server which manages ALL Hosts, and provides features such as configuring VMware HA, and other VMware functions such as vMotion, VMware vSphere DRS, VMware Fault Tolerance.

Use Microsoft Network Load balancing or a dedicated hardware load balancer, without knowing your application, how it works, and is configured, it is very difficult to speculate what would really help you.

and you've not provided current performance parameters, as to what tweaks are required to help, what performance bottleneck you have, e.g. CPU, Memory, Disk I/O, Network etc

and whether additional virtual machines, in a farm would help you.

e.g. how many VMs do you currently have running on your host ?

and those question still remain unanswered. I'm afraid you have jumped to a scale out, and lets load balance, before looking at the current performance metrics, to see if your single VM, with correct specification and hardware could be solved.

and the question was about optimize-ing a current VM ?

So lets have the performance metrics, specifications, which have been asked for.

What version of VMware vSphere do you have ?

and what licenses do you have for it ?

Do you currently use vCenter Server and have more than a single ESXi host ?

How many VMs are running ?
"and whether additional virtual machines, in a farm would help you."

I will make use your articlem, https://www.experts-exchange.com/articles/10304/HOW-TO-Performance-Monitor-vSphere-4-x-or-5-0.html

I am on a study phrase of VMward learning and I want to see how VMware do it .

MySQL and MS SQL has shared nothing, horizontal scale out method, I want to know how VMward do it.

will post other question.

So I assume VMware do not have such load balancing and/or load scale out function.
tks
MySQL and MS SQL has shared nothing, horizontal scale out method,

Yes - Microsoft does. But that's a Microsoft OS function and not VMware.

All VMware has, is the ability to "try" and distribute VMs across multiple hosts, to ensure that VMs, receive the correct CPU and Memory that has been set in the VM.

That is not going to help you out with a slow VM, that requires a change, or analysis of the application.
I am talking about how to scale it out in case it is slow to understand how VMward and Hyper-V duel with this kind of expanding/enhancement.

With a Hyper-V cluster we add more nodes to make sure we have enough RAM and CPU to meet workload needs especially at peak times. With Scale-Out File Server we add nodes and JBODs to scale out both in IOPS and storage volume.

For the storage to compute fabric we start with 10Gb RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) via Mellanox product and scale up to 25Gb, 40Gb, 56Gb, or 100Gb.
Andrew,

"All VMware has, is the ability to "try" and distribute VMs across multiple hosts"

and access them across mulitple hosts at the same time ? so this is the load balancing solution ? in round robin manner ?

WMWare HA will do the job ?

Philip,

"With a Hyper-V cluster we add more nodes to make sure we have enough RAM and CPU to meet workload needs especially at peak times. "

but add more nodes also means all nodes (physical nodes) offer more power for the SAME VM ?

I have another ticket that ask how can I use Hype -V to host a redhat linux /oracle linux so that I can install MySQL/oracle/sybase DB on that linux VM box, you can share you idea here.
VMware High Availability (HA) Product Briefs

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/ha_datasheet.pdf

VMware vSphere knows nothing about your VMs or how they work, VMware vSphere DRS is at the HOST level.

It's not load balancing, e.g. Host CPU and Memory, is NOT equal across all hosts.

You still need to configure and build your solution to scale out
I found good youtube video on that and we have VMWare HA, which is good.

but I don't hear anything like load balance in VMward, it is just cluster.

"You still need to configure and build your solution to scale out"

VMware do not designed to scale out ? what solution can help VMware ?
I have the impression that the understanding here is cluster = load balancing.

Cluster =/= load balancing. That is, cluster does not equal load balancing.

Cluster provides resilience in the case of component or server failure. Workloads running on a node that fails would get moved over to another node and the OSE (Operating System Environment) would get restarted on that node.

In the case of 2012 RTM/R2 and 2016 there are features such as guest clusters which is a cluster within a cluster that allows for some form of load balancing with the guest nodes. But, in the end there would still be the hardware limitations that each node would have with just the guests themselves.

There are server applications such as IIS, Apache, SQL, Exchange, and others that have the ability to scale out by adding more and more VMs to a specific resource pool.

In the physical server world the performance boundary is the physical box. That is the case with a VM. The performance boundaries are the node's limitations: Memory (NUMA), CPU (thread count to core count), and storage setup and access fabric. To scale performance up/out one adds more nodes/boxes into the mix. That is not a function of cluster, that is a function of adding more compute into the mix to give more resources to the workload/server application.