Troubleshooting Performance Related Problems in vSphere 4.1 Environments

Source : communities.vmware.com

The hugely popular Performance Troubleshooting for VMware vSphere 4 guide is now updated for vSphere 4.1 . This document provides step-by-step approach for troubleshooting most common performance problems in vSphere-based virtual environments. The steps discussed in the document use performance data and charts readily available in the vSphere Client and esxtop to aid the troubleshooting flows. Each performance troubleshooting flow has two parts:

1. How to identify the problem using specific performance counters.
2. Possible causes of the problem and solutions to solve it.

New sections that were added to the document include troubleshooting performance problems in resource pools on standalone hosts and DRS clusters, additional troubleshooting steps for environments experiencing memory pressure (hosts with compressed and swapped memory), high CPU ready time in hosts that are not CPU saturated, environments sharing resources such as storage and network, and environments using snapshots.

This document by no means covers the entire breadth of performance-related problems. We request the readers of this document, including VMware performance community members and vSphere administrators, to help us enhance this document by letting us know about all the performance problems they encounter in their vSphere-based virtual environments, including those that require elaborate troubleshooting steps.  We hope that the community will actively contribute by engaging in live discussions, providing feedback, and asking questions. All this input will serve as the topics for future updates.

vsphere41-performance-troubleshooting.pdf (755.0 K) 

What is FAST? (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) at vBlock (by VMware, EMC, Cisco)

What is FAST? (Fully Automated Storage Tiering) at vBlock
Now available for 3 Flavors (Celera, CX4, Symmetrix)

FAST approach is the Brand new at EMC,
which will automatically move the the LUNs as below..

High I/O LUN’s to Flash Drives (SSD Hdd’s)
Modest I/O LUN’s to F.C Drives
Least I/O LUN’s to SATA Drives

Here are some features, highlights of FAST and how it operates.

• FAST will perform data movement based on IOPS, average I/O size and write percentage.
This is currently true for the Symmetrix V-Max, Clariion CX4 and Celerra NS.

• Three elements that define FAST: Storage Type, FAST policies and Storage Groups.

• FAST is based on user defined -- configuration policies.

• The configuration of FAST is typically done through FAST wizards FAST LUN Migrator for Clariion CX4,
(Symmetrix Management Console) on Symmetrix V-Max and Rainfinity File Management Appliance or VE for Celerra NS.

NOTE: Out of the box thinking by EMC, imagine the flexibility one would have
with a large infrastructure and FAST moving data based on policy.
It’s all about the big picture.

FAST – EMC Hands on Demo



Source : www.storagenerve.com (Full Article Link below)

http://storagenerve.com/tag/vblock/

Performance Monitoring of LUN, HBA, VM & for Which Threshold values, you should show concern

The esxtop utility can be used to measure how much I/O is moving across various devices. The esxtop utility is interactive. As such, pressing certain keys changes the view.

Configuring monitoring using esxtop

To monitor storage performance per HBA:

1. Start esxtop by typing esxtop at the command line.
   
2. Press d to switch to disk view (HBA mode).
   
3. Press f to modify the fields that are displayed.
   
4. Press b, c, d, e, h, and j to toggle the fields and press Enter.
   
5. Press s, then 2 to alter the update time to every 2 seconds and press Enter.
   
6. See Analyzing esxtop columns for a description of relevant columns.

 Click below --> "Read More" for Full Article (Tolerable Threshold Values in Real time)..