Top 10 things you must read about VMware Performance

By Eric Siebert
published: Wednesday, June 18 2008

Properly configuring your host servers for maximum perfomance is critical to any virtual server environment where you have many virtual machines running on a single physical host. There are numerous potential bottlenecks that can effect the overall performance of your host servers and the virtual machines that run on them. Understanding the factors that impact performance is critical to being able to properly troubleshoot and resolve performance problems in your environment. The material in this top 10 list will help you to understand things that will impact performance, how to properly configure your hosts and guests to achieve maximum performance, how to overcome specific bottlenecks and how to monitor performance. It contains VMworld and EMC World presentations, white papers and also presentations from VMware user group meetings.

 
Understanding Performance in a Virtualized Environment

http://vmworld.com/vmworld/mylearn?classID=11049

A VMworld 2007 presentation on understanding virtulization performance and overhead as well as dispelling common myths. 

Interpreting Performance Statistics in V13

http://vmworld.com/vmworld/mylearn?classID=11682

A VMworld 2007 presentation on understanding and interpreting VirtualCenter/ESX statistics in the VI Client and esxtop. 

Performance Tuning Best Practices for ESX Server 3

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

A white paper from VMware with performance tips that cover the most performance-critical areas of Virtual Infrastructure 3.

 
Top 12 ways to Improve Guest Server Performance under VMware ESX Server

http://www.vmworld.com/vmworld/mylearn?classID=12825

A VMworld 2006 presentation with 12 tips for configuring hosts, virtual machines and guest environments for best performance.

 
Performance Monitoring and Capacity Planning

http://www.vmworld.com/vmworld/mylearn?classID=12789

A VMworld 2006 presentation on performance tuning methodologies and approaches.

 
ESX Workload Analysis: Lessons Learned

http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/adc9398.pdf

A VMworld 2006 presentation on performing workload analysis and performance analysis of virtual workloads. 

 
VMware ESX Server: Best Practices for Performance

https://140.110.8.180/king/modules/userupload/upload/ets2007/vmware.13.pdf

A presentation from EMC World 2007 with recommended performance practices and benchmarking guidelines.

 
VM Performance Monitoring and Logging

http://communities.vmware.com/servlet/JiveServlet/download/702886-1575/NEVMUG071907.pdf

A VMUG presentation from VMware on performance monitoring and using log files.

 
ESX3 Performance Tuning

http://vmware-land.com/downloads/VMUG_ESX3_Performance_Tuning_2007-08-15.pdf

A VMUG presentation from Long View Systems on performance tuning ESX hosts and virtual machines.

 
Performance Tuning for VI3

http://download3.vmware.com/vmworld/2006/tac9872.pdf

A VMworld 2006 presentation on basic performance concepts, tools, technologies and recommendations.

Coming Next Week: Top 10 Things you must read about Disaster Recover/Business Continuity and Vmware

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