VMware has released a white paper titled: Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.1. The paper which contains 60 pages provides performance tips which cover the most performance-critical areas of VMware vSphere 4.1.
The document covers the following topics:
- Hardware for use with VMware vSphere
- ESX and virtual machines
- Guest operating systems
- Virtual infrastructure management
"…General ESX Networking Considerations:
- In a native environment, CPU utilization plays a significant role in network throughput. To process higher levels of throughput, more CPU resources are needed. The effect of CPU resource availability on the network throughput of virtualized applications is even more significant. Because insufficient CPUresources will limit maximum throughput, it is important to monitor the CPU utilization of high-throughput workloads.
- Use separate virtual switches, each connected to its own physical network adapter, to avoid contention between the ESX service console, the VMkernel, and virtual machines, especially virtual machines running heavy networking workloads.
- To establish a network connection between two virtual machines that reside on the same ESX system, connect both virtual machines to the same virtual switch. If the virtual machines are connected to different virtual switches, traffic will go through wire and incur unnecessary CPU and network overhead…"
Thanks to Eric Sloof for providing the news.