5 Top VMware® Configurations That
Cause Performance Nightmares!
WHITE PAPER
by Matt Murren, CEO October 2013
Dear Colleague,
In recent times, the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of cloud computing has become more and more accepted throughout the business world. For most businesses, the concern is not whether they should move to the cloud, but identifying their infrastructure needs are and optimizing performance given the new possibilities in cloud computing.
As most IT professionals are aware, VMware® has emerged as an industry leader in the field of cloud hosting. Since the IT landscape rapidly changed from virtualization to wholesale cloud hosting, VMware® came up with a way to standardize security and communication across private and public clouds, making hybrid cloud hosting a real possibility for clients. According to a study conducted by EMC, the hybrid cloud model can reduce IT costs from 20-30 per cent from traditional IT models, making it the most cost-effective cloud solution for most enterprises.
IT businesses, consultants, and technicians are scrambling to keep up with these rapid changes in the industry to stay competitive and offer their clients and business partners the best possible service.
As a trusted resource for executives, business owners, and IT professionals for over a decade, True North prides itself on staying ahead of the curve, with several of our team members boasting advanced VMware® certifications (such as VCAP-DCA and VCAP-DCD). We want you to be able to draw on their expertise and stay informed of configuration problems to avoid, in case you’re considering VMware® as a part of your cloud hosting service stack.
Navigating the intersection between business and technology can be nerve-wracking. True North takes pride in providing you with the tools you need to achieve your goals successfully. We’ve learned first-hand that a large part of that achievement lies in navigating change. With that in mind, we’d like to point out some potential pitfalls, helping you and your company stay strong in today’s competitive environment.
Dedicated to serving you,
True North ITG.
About True North ITG
True North was founded to help businesses of all kinds get the most out of their technology and to allow their networks to stay up and running smoothly. Over the years we’ve helped many businesses relieve their technology and networking worries, so that they can concentrate on growing their business and realizing their goals.
We’ve been servicing clients of all sizes for over 10 years and ALL of our specialists are qualified and tested experts who hold up-to-date certifications and expertise in both networking and cloud computing. When you hire us for ANY project, not only can you expect it to be done right, but you can expect it to be done on time and on budget.
5 Top VMware® Misconfigurations That Cause Performance Nightmares!
In this report, we’ll identify the top 5 most common misconfigurations IT pros make in VMware® that can cost their businesses time, money, causing nightmares for them and for their clients:
1. Incorrect VM Allocation
2. Incorrect Networking configurations
3. Incorrect Storage Networking configurations
4. Incorrect or not optimized High Availability (HA) configurations 5. Improper Disaster Recovery or Backup plan for vCenter
1. Incorrect Virtual Machine (VM) Allocation
A critical piece of VMware® infrastructure configuration is allocating computing resources to the Virtual Machine. What some techs don’t know is that over-allocation of resources at the VM level actually worsens performance. This is a common problem, since, in business, usually more is better – hence the confusion. Clients and sometimes inexperienced techs assume giving an infrastructure more computing power will lead to a stronger end-user experience.
Also, if the sales department is uninformed, or the assessment process for the client is poorly coordinated, someone in your company may attempt to sweeten the deal for the client by offering more computing power to enhance performance. Would that be the outcome? Not so fast.
Let’s look at an example. If you allocate four vCPUs to a low-end Virtual Machine, but it only requires one, the VM has to wait for all four cores to be available on the host. This creates CPU ready time in which the VM has to wait for all 4 vCPUs to be ready. Basically, the user is waiting for the system to boot up. Even though the sales package including higher computation capacity may have sounded better up front, clients are in for a longer wait, and voila, your client’s company is now less efficient.
In this case, the type of VM and the number of vCPUs is a poor match, leaving the client with the impression that the VMs don’t run as smoothly as physical machines. In reality, though, they run much better when configured correctly. Part of the provider’s job is to optimize performance. That means allocating the appropriate amount of resources. Like Goldilocks in front of Baby Bear’s bowl of porridge, your clients should feel like everything is just right. In the interest of client satisfaction and company success, make sure you take best fit resource allocation into consideration at this important stage.
2. Incorrect Networking Configurations
In configuring VMware® environments, you should keep in mind two key principles: redundancy and consistency. When it comes to configuring the network, one problem we come across frequently is not enough redundancy. Implementing systems for redundancy is critical to giving your clients proper protection, minimizing headaches for you, and protecting your colleague’s eardrum when they field complaint calls.
Likely, when a client came to you for cloud migration, some of their biggest concerns were performance and protection. Most cloud sales teams convince the client that the quality of their computing experience will improve by moving to the cloud. It will be faster and more reliable. When you don’t include enough network redundancy in your configuration, you are compromising the ability of the system to detect failures and take action. This can lead to the sense that the cloud is less reliable overall, or, even worse – cause your client to seek out your competitor.
Although the default configuration from VMware® provides a perfectly functioning network, making sure the configuration has proper redundancy systems falls to you. Besides obvious considerations like distributing data across multiple drives by selecting an appropriate RAID level for your client’s infrastructure, one way to improve redundancy of the network is adaptor teaming. In VMware®’s default setting, one physical network adaptor is connected to a virtual switch. Instead, use a team of two separate network adaptors and connect them to two separate switches. This gives you several independent paths for communication or what’s called “network interface card (NIC) teaming,” and gets you a much more resilient network in case there’s some sort of failure. Depending on the system size, you can even expand on this for greater protection, teaming the NIC ports to different dual-port cards and running them to multiple switches. The more redundancy, the higher the protection level.
Of course, even after you’ve established this failsafe, make sure you test it properly before getting your client up and running. One way to do this is to pull out a physical network cable in the architecture. If you’ve configured the system correctly, removing a single component should have no discernible effect on performance. A word to the wise: the untested failsafe is the uncertain failsafe!
The same principle applies to putting in redundancy for data storage. If any component of the storage area network (SAN) fails, such as an adapter, switch, or cable, the system will need a backup plan. Two ways to address this potential problem are multipathing and path failover.
Multipathing is simply the use of multiple paths to move the data from the host to the external storage. How exactly to configure this will depend on your storage protocol, as well as the adapter, switch, and array components available in your setup. Configuring this intelligently will keep the data transfer amount balanced. What you don’t want is data overload or a bottleneck in any one part of system, keeping the risk of failure to a minimum. Stay balanced and keep those virtual machines purring sweetly.
Should failure still occur for whatever reason, you’ll need a backup plan. Path failover refers to the smooth shift from one physical data path to another without using the failed component. As with multipathing, precisely how this is configured depends on your system, but adding these principles to your checklist during the configuration process will make for a smooth cloud experience for your clients.
3. Incorrect Storage Networking Considerations
The most common issue we encounter in addressing storage network problems for our clients’ Virtual Machines is underestimated performance requirements when scaling. The root of the problem is a lack of awareness of capacity and sizing requirements on the part of the original tech that set up the system. One of the biggest selling points for cloud computing is its scalability. If you don’t take the time to properly assess your client’s computing needs, there’s no way you’ll know how to optimize a scalable environment for them, and once again, you risk losing their business.
Of course, shifting from a traditional hard drive to a hypervisor with multiple virtual machines attached will affect the performance of an operating system that was originally developed for that single hard drive. Think of Windows on a desktop. To keep performance high, you need to keep in mind the required input/output operations per second (IOPS) in your assessment, which will change based on user or task. Identify whether your VM user is Light, Medium, Standard, or Heavy, then allocate resources accordingly.
The key here is your assessment process. Identify how many users you’ll have, and determine each user’s computing needs. We often see this step rushed or every VM given the same setup with no adjustment by individual user, even when clients are told their cloud will be tailored to their business needs. Of course, you want to take into account what kind of applications the client is running. Rich media, for example, needs faster processing and more resources.
Capacity sizing requires accurate assessment, too. If you go through the planning steps, you should clearly establish total capacity needed for safe and optimal performance on each virtual machine. Tally up the number of virtual machines, your total back-end IOPS needs, the required number of your LUNs or data stores, and add at least 20 per cent of overall IOPS for storm conditions. For your final overall storage capacity needs, take into account how much growth is anticipated for the client’s storage needs. Take the time to think ahead.
In assessing this part of the configuration and your client’s needs, you need to balance performance, capacity, operational simplicity, and future requirements. This last piece is the easiest to leave out, especially if a network tech is trying to finish quickly and move on to other projects. Taking that extra time to look at your client’s current and future computing needs goes a long way in establishing your professionalism as a business partner and trustworthy IT caretaker.
4. Incorrect High Availability Configurations
Another critical part of ensuring smooth cloud computing is the High Availability (HA) configuration. Implicit in the term “High Availability” is that the system is ready and available when necessary. Proper HA configuration eliminates single points of failure when using business-critical applications. It keeps larger tasks like system monitoring streamlined and automated. Thank you, cloud!
In short, proper HA config makes sure the end-user will maintain all the benefits of cloud computing. Proper HA involves configuring multiple hosts as a cluster. This prevents outages and reduces labor, troubleshooting, and associated costs. A decent HA configuration will detect and react to failures, and will restart virtual machines on active hosts within the cluster as needed.
One key HA configuration piece worth considering is the selection of the host. When you select the host, make sure you have redundant power supply, error-correcting memory, and remote monitoring. Also, pay attention to host location. You should have the host distributed across multiple racks to make sure any single failure, even physical, doesn’t interfere with cluster functioning.
Another HA configuration piece that can be overlooked is the use of identical server hardware. As stated above, the key concept when configuring the HA is consistency. You want the hardware to be consistent so managing the servers using the host profiles will stay simple. Who wants to keep different ports, addresses, and labels in mind? This makes documentation and hand-off a bigger nuisance than it already is. Any inconsistency in your system that keeps a virtual machine from being started by any of the cluster hosts would be a big problem. Consistency also means you keep a balanced cluster and that your resources don’t get fragmented. Now that’s more like it.
Having said that, most problems with the configuration of HA are connected to networking redundancy (Section 2 above). If the cloud infrastructure you have configured contains the right communication and redundancy with multipathing techniques, you should have smooth HA processing, too, since these two processes are interconnected. So, keep it consistent, keep it redundant, keep it smooth. Got it? Good.
5. Improper Disaster Recovery or Backup Plan for vCenter
Maybe the biggest component in the VMware® infrastructure configuration as far as your client is concerned will be the Disaster Recovery Plan. Outline your plan clearly and make it easily communicable to ease any concerns on their part. Consider a few short bullet points on the subject. A decent Disaster Recovery Plan manager should be able to build, manage, test, and run a recovery plan smoothly in any part of the VMware® environment.
What’s included in a quality Disaster Recovery Plan, you ask? It should be able to retain historical data, provide duplicate data and configuration from an alternate location, and maintain all software prerequisites for the VCM installation. And what should happen in case of failover? Let’s take a look. First, the Virtual Machines at the protected site should be shut down, if possible. Then, the mirroring between storage systems should be interrupted, with the secondary copy of the data accessible to backup servers. Finally the VMs should be registered and restarted on the backup servers. Ideally, all of this will be properly configured and automated, so no one is left scrambling in case of emergency. That’s the power of cloud computing!
In order to retain historical data, VMware® recommends scheduling a weekly full backup of system data, and a daily backup of differential data across all virtual machines. The amount of time to keep the data will depend on the amount of storage available for the client’s infrastructure. Depending on the volume of information, you will also have to choose whether you want to keep an ongoing synchronous or asynchronous replication process. Synchronous replication maintains an exact mirror of the host at the backup location, while asynchronous replication means the update on the host is acknowledged immediately, while the actual replication occurs later. If the data amount is significant, it can cause write delay or latency. So, with high volume infrastructures, asynchronous replication is the way to go.
Did we mention redundancy yet? Each step in the process should include redundancy provisions, and be tested at both the protected site and the recovery site to ensure maximum protection.
In case you didn’t pick up on this, at all times during your VMware® environment configuration process, from network to data storage to HA to Disaster Recovery, keep in mind the principles of redundancy and consistency to make sure your VMware® environment configuration is a sound one, so your clients stay up and running, enjoying all the benefits of cloud computing, allowing you to maintain a successful business partnership.
We hope you have found this guide helpful in shedding some light on how to avoid problems when configuring your VMware® environment. As stated in the opening of this report, our purpose in providing this information is to help you maintain a professional level of service when providing for the computing needs of your clientele.
If you are part of an organization that could benefit from our expertise in cloud computing, you will find information on how to request a FREE VMware® Health Check from True North below. This is, of course, provided for free with no obligations and no expectations on our part. We want to be clear that this is NOT a bait and switch offer or a trick to get you to buy something. Our reputation as an honest and trustworthy business is something we hold very dear. We would never jeopardize that in any way. So why are we offering something like this for free?
Two reasons:
1. This service is a risk-free “get to know us” offer to people we haven’t had the pleasure of doing business with. Again, our goal is to allow you to make an informed and confident decision; offering this service is one way we can help you better evaluate our services.
2. This will allow us to determine if we even CAN help you. Obviously, we can’t help everyone and our offerings might not be a good fit for your particular circumstances. Conducting this VMware® Health Check enables us to perform a small service to you and give you a risk-free way of determining whether or not we’re the right company to help you without risking your money.
Looking forward to your call!
True North ITG. 1.800.372.1660
As a prospective customer, we would like to offer you a FREE VMware® Health Check and environment analysis. This assessment has three parts:
1. VMware® Environment Analysis: Our first step is to look at your current VMware® environment configuration, including applications, data storage, computing power, data flow, and disaster recovery plans. Our goal is to get a comprehensive picture of your network infrastructure and compare it to your computing needs. Often, there are savings to be had or obvious improvements to be made based on these initial findings.
2. VMware® Health Check: We will perform a full analysis of your entire network to look for instability or insufficient redundancy, as well as other hidden problems that you might not know about. Often we find faulty configurations or missing security elements that, if left unaddressed, could end up costing you MORE in support, business downtime, and data loss. In this phase, we examine your entire stack, including:
• Applications and usage • Operating System • Kernel
• Host
• Network configuration • Storage
• Disaster Recovery Plan
3. VMware® Optimization: When complete, we’ll identify how to optimize your VMware® environment for best end-user experience, resilience, and elasticity, pointing out any areas that require immediate attention. Even if you decide not to hire us, having a third party conduct this type of assessment will give you some good information on the security and overall health of your computer network.
You can request your FREE VMware® Health Check online, at www.truenorthitg.com, or call us directly at 800.372.1660!
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