Optimize VMware I/O Performance
Monitor VMware I/O to Optimize Performance
Today’s IT staff are reluctant to virtualize their most mission-critical applications, and with good reason. The performance impact of virtualization is still more of a guessing game than a science. And though there are dozens of established tools to optimize server configurations, the biggest performance unknown is and has always been the impact on VMware I/O on the VMware SAN storage infrastructure. Even the performance gurus at VMware report that, in the instances where they are brought in to fix performance, over 90% of problems wind up being due to the storage network. Yes, most VMware performance problems are I/O related, yet nearly all monitoring tools are blind to ESX/ESXi I/O, focusing instead on CPU and memory.
VirtualWisdom is the only solution that directly measures the I/O performance effect (latency, bandwidth, re-tries, errors, etc.) on vsphere performance. The VMware, application, and SAN teams will immediately see the performance effect on the application of capacity additions, configuration changes, component/device changes, failing devices, or even application changes. With VirtualWisdom, performance problems can be immediately identified and resolved, increasing overall application response times and end-user customer satisfaction.
By using VirtualWisdom to establish a baseline and monitoring VMware storage traffic in real-time, IT staff can immediately detect utilization that exceeds performance thresholds and can trigger a recommendation to move VM workloads, with VMotion, to less I/O intensive servers.
The risk of over-burdening physical servers means that the promise of greater CPU utilization is only partially met in most data centers. VirtualWisdom’s User Definable Correlation (UDC) capabilities enable virtualization administrators to play "what if" scenarios to test different layouts, including finding VMware I/O peaks and trends. With this information, virtualization administrators can more confidently provision higher-value applications to virtualized systems, or they can achieve significantly higher consolidation ratios by removing underutilized ESX/ESXi servers from clusters and optimally balancing VMs across servers based on all dimensions of performance (CPU, memory, I/O). For more information on this latter use-case, watch this four-minute video.
Examine the VirtualWisdom brochure to learn more about how VirtualWisdom can help solve other issues, or read about how this financial services firm uses VirtualWisdom to help balance virtual machine loads in a VMware ESX/ESXi environment.
