Where IT perceptions are reality Document # INDUSTRY2013002, v4 v2 October June 2013 2013 Copyright 2013© IT Brand Pulse. All rights reserved.
Harnessing the Power Most medium and large-sized IT organizations have deployed several generations of virtualized servers, and they have become more comfortable with the performance and reliability with each deployment. As IT organizations increased virtual machine (VM) density, they reached the limits of vSphere software, server memory, CPU, and I/O. A new VM engine is now available and this document describes how it can help IT organizations maximize use of their servers running VMware® vSphere® 5.
Best Practices in vSphere 5.1 Start with Planning When planning a VMware installation, it is important to take into account the new capabilities of vSphere 5.1. VMware has added significantly to the scalability of vSphere 5.1. For data centers virtualizing Tier-1 applications, the significant scalability enhancement is the ability to have up to 1TB of memory and 64 virtual CPU cores (vCPU) per VM. This will ensure that almost all Tier-1 applications should perform well in a vSphere 5.1 environment.
Increasing VM Density The Great VM Proliferation With many server admins working on their 3rd and 4th generation of virtualized servers, the focus has changed from interoperability and learning the behavior of vSphere 5.1, to increasing VM density (#VMs/Physical Host Server). With the availability of servers based on Intel’s E5 processors (multi-core, 768GB of RAM, PCI Express® Gen3), a new, gamechanging compute platform was introduced.
A New 8 Cylinder VM Engine The Intel Xeon E5 Platform The introduction of the Intel® Xeon® E5 family of processors responds to the call for more virtual server resources with two more cores, 8MB more cache, and six more DIMMs of faster DDR3-1600 memory, increasing the total to eight cores, 768GB of RAM, and doubling the I/O bandwidth with PCIe® 3.0.
QLogic I/O = Higher VM Density 2X More VMs Per Server with vSphere 5.1, Xeon E5, and QLogic Server Adapters Any concern about hosting Tier-1 apps on VMs has been elevated with vSphere 5.1, Intel E5 processors, and next-generation I/O throughput of the QLogic multiprotocol server adapters. Even flagship enterprise applications such as SAP, which typically require dozens of development, QA/test, and production servers, have adopted server virtualization within these environments as a best practice.
A New Virtualization Chassis VMware vSphere 5.1 The newest release of vSphere represents a high-performance VM chassis capable of harnessing the power of a new CPU engine and drives requirements for an expanded I/O interface. The new I/O capabilities of QLogic server adapters combined with vSphere 5.1 complement enhancements related to Storage vMotion. Storage vMotion—vSphere 5.1 enables users to combine vMotion and Storage vMotion into one operation.
Turbocharged Fuel Injection QLogic Server Adapters vSphere 5.1 and Xeon E5 processors streamline the procedure of moving VMs and their associated storage with vMotion and Storage vMotion and support low-latency networking traffic with SR-IOV. Moving terabytes of data across VMs and the migration of virtual servers requires low-latency, high-performance I/O adapters.
Network I/O Planning Picking the Right I/O Pieces, and Making Them Work Together Tier-1 applications are uniquely demanding in many dimensions. Their needs with respect to CPU power, memory footprint, high availability/failover, resiliency, and responsiveness to outside stimuli is typically unmatched within the enterprise. Moreover, Tier-1 applications also tend to be tightly integrated with other applications and resources within the enterprise.
Accelerating App Performance Accelerate VM Data with QLogic FabricCache™ 10000 Series Adapters The QLogic FabricCache™ 10000 Series Adapter is the industry's first caching SAN adapter. This new class of server-based PCIe flash/Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters uses the Fibre Channel network to cache and share SAN metadata. Adding large caches to servers places the cache closest to the application and in a position where it is insensitive to congestion.
Faster Storage vMotion Gen 5 Fibre Channel Improves Storage VMotion I/O Throughput A process known as Storage vMotion allows for a non-disruptive migration of running VM disk files between two different physical storage devices. This process allows for the VM to remain running with no need to take its workload offline to move the VM’s files to a different physical storage device.
Storage Protocol Flexibility QLogic 8300 Series Converged Network Adapters Enable Convergence at the VM Edge QLogic Converged Network Adapter solutions leverage core technologies and expertise, including the most established and proven driver stack in the industry. These adapters are designed for next-generation, virtualized, and unified data centers with powerful multiprocessor, multicore servers.
Low-Latency Connectivity QLogic 8300 Series Converged Network Adapters Offload the VM Kernel from Switching Virtual NICs Single Root I/O Virtualization is a standard that allows one PCI Express (PCIe) adapter to be presented as multiple separate logical devices to VMs for partitioning adapter bandwidth. The hypervisor manages the Physical Function (PF) while the Virtual Functions (VFs) are exposed to the VMs.
Doubled I/O Throughput In Transaction-Intensive and Bandwidth-Intensive Environments With the availability of Gen 5 Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters, larger block I/Os have doubled their throughput compared to 8Gb per second bandwidth. Together with better CPU efficiency per I/O, throughput for random I/Os for small block sizes have increased because their throughput is no longer bounded by the Fibre Channel link speed of 8Gbps as before.
Higher Efficiency In Transaction-Intensive and Bandwidth-Intensive Environments For virtualized environments, the most critical measure of performance is the ability to scale as the number of VMs and application workloads increase. In testing conducted by QLogic, the QLE2672 FlexSuite Gen 5 Fibre Channel Adapter delivered: 3X the transactions and 2X the bandwidth of 8Gb Fibre Channel Adapters.
Linear Scalability More Virtual CPUs for Scaling Tier-1 Apps with vSphere 5 If you’re concerned about hosting tier-1 apps on VMs, the argument about virtualizing tier-1 apps is over. Even flagship enterprise applications such as SAP, Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012, and Exchange 2010 have adopted server virtualization as a best practice. As an example, the CPU, memory, storage, and networking requirements are well documented by SAP.
I/O Dashboard and Control QConvergeConsole Plug-In for Single Pane Adapter Management Installation and management of high-performance server adapters can be complicated if it’s not integrated with vSphere. The QLogic QConvergeConsole plug-in for vCenter is available with vCenter Server—providing an intuitive and easy-to-use dashboard view of all QLogic adapters.
Resources Related Links What’s New in vSphere 5 Performance What’s New in vSphere 5 Networking What’s New in vSphere 5 Storage What’s New in vSphere 5.1 Networking What’s New in vSphere 5.1 Storage VMware vSphere 5.
