This session covered some of the major performance enhancements in vSphere 5.0. The presenter flew through the slides at 100 MPH and didn’t spend much time on the bullets so I wasn’t able to capture all of the highlights. But here’s what I did capture:
- 32-way vCPUs with 92-97% of native performance
- CPU scheduler improvements for up to 30% performance increase
- vNUMA for NUMA aware applications (mostly for HPC). Turned off for < 8way VMs, turned on for 8-way or greater VMs.
- vCenter can now process double the number of concurrent operations
- 9x faster HA reconfiguration time
- 60% more VMs failover in the same time period with the new HA engine
- NetIOC – True QoS tagging at the MAC layer and user defined network pools
- Splitrxmode can reduce packet loss dramatically under specific circumstances (30K packets per second, more than 24 VMs on a host)
- TCP/IP optimizations that boost iSCSI performance
- Netflow5 support in the dVS
- Multi-NIC vMotion enablement
- Storage migration with write mirroring
- Host cache – SSDs for swap. Memory hierarchy is: Transparent page sharing, ballooning, compression, then host cache.
- 30% performance improvement over spinning disk swap
- Storage is the root cause for most virtualization performance problems. !!!
- (Note, presenter covered many new storage enhancements that I wrote about in previous blogs so I stopped taking notes.)
- Software FCoE initiator has nearly the same performance as traditional FC HBAs
- An example vMotion improvement for a 28GB Exchange 2010 VM was from 71 seconds on 4.1 to 47 seconds on 5.0 using 10GbE.
- VDI workload denisty has also been increased more than 25%
There was a whole bunch of other tidbits that I just couldn’t write down fast enough, but the list above is a good start. vSphere 5.0 has over 200 new features, so clear this list is far from complete.
