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8/9/2019 Vsphere Whatsnew Performance Wp
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Whats New in VMware vSphere 4:
Performance Enhancements
W H I T E P A P E R
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VMware white paper
Sclbility enhncmnts 3
CPU enhncmnts 4
Mmoy enhncmnts 4
S t o g e n h n c m n t s 5
Ntoking enhncmnts 7
r s o u c M n g m n t e n h n c m n t s 8
Pfomnc Mngmnt enhncmnts 9
appliction Pfomnc 9
Ocl 9
SQL Sv 10Sap 10
excng 11
Summy 12
rfncs 12
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VMware white paper
VMware vSphere 4, the industrys rst cloud operating system, includes several unique new eatures that allow IT organizations
to leverage the benets o cloud computing, with maximum eciency, uncompromised control, and exibility o choice.
The new VMware vSphere 4 provides signicant perormance enhancements that make it easier or organizations to virtualize
their most demanding and intense workloads. These perormance enhancements provide VMware vSphere 4 with better:
Efficiency: Optimizations resulting in reduced virtualization overheads and highest consolidation ratios.
Control: Enhancements leading to improved ongoing perormance monitoring and management, as well as
dynamic resource sizing or better scalability.
Choice: Improvements that provide several options o guest OS, virtualization technologies, comprehensive HCL,
integrations with 3rd-party management tools to choose rom.
This document outlines the key perormance enhancements o VMware vSphere 4, organized into ollowing categories:
ScalabilityEnhancements
CPU,Memory,Storage,Networking
ResourceManagement
PerformanceManagement
Finally, the white paper showcases the perormance improvements in various tier-1 enterprise applications as a result
o these benets.
Sclbility enhncmnts
A summary o the key new scalability improvements o vSphere 4 as compared to VMwares previous datacenter
product, VMware Inrastructure 3 (VI3), is shown in the ollowing table:
Ftu VI3 vSph 4
Vul Mcn CpU Coun 4 vCpUs 8 vCpUs
Vul Mcn Mmoy Mxmum 64 GB 255 GB
hos CpU Co Mxmum 32 cos 64 cos
hos Mmoy Mxmum 256 GB 1 tB
pod-on VMs eSX/eSX Mxmum 128 256
For details see Systems Compatibility Guide and Guest Operating System Installation Guide.
Additional changes that enhance the scalability o vSphere include:
64 Logical CPUs and 256 Virtual CPUs Per Host ESX/ESXi 4.0 provides headroom or more virtual machines per
host and the ability to achieve even higher consolidation ratios on larger machines.
64-bit VMkernel The VMkernel, a core component o the ESX/ESXi 4.0 hypervisor, is now 64-bit. This provides
greater host physical memory capacity and more seamless hardware support than earlier releases.
64-bit Service Console The Linux-based Service Console or ESX 4.0 has been upgraded to a 64-bit versionderived rom a recent release o a leading Enterprise Linux vendor.
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VMware white paper
New Virtual Hardware ESX/ESXi 4.0 introduces a new generation o virtual hardware (virtual hardware version 7)
which adds signiicant new eatures including:
Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) virtual device for Microsoft Cluster ServiceProvidessupportforrunningWindowsServer2008 in a Microsot Cluster Service coniguration.
IDE virtual device Ideal or supporting older operating systems that lack SCSI drivers.
VMXNET Generation 3SeetheNetworkingsection.
Virtual Machine Hot Plug SupportProvidessupportforaddingandremovingvirtualdevices,addingvirtualCPUs,and
adding memory to a virtual machine without having to power o the virtual machine.
Hardware version 7 is the deault or new ESX/ESXi 4.0 virtual machines. ESX/ESXi 4.0 will continue to run virtual
machines created on hosts running ESX Server versions 2.x and 3.x. Virtual machines that use virtual hardware version
7 eatures are not compatible with ESX/ESXi releases prior to version 4.0.
VMDirectPath for Virtual MachinesVMDirectPathI/OdeviceaccessenhancesCPUefficiencyinhandlingworkloads
that require constant and requent access to I/O devices by allowing virtual machines to directly access the underlying
hardware devices. Other virtualization eatures, such as VMotion, hardware independence and sharing o physicalI/Odeviceswillnotbeavailabletothevirtualmachinesusingthisfeature.VMDirectPathI/OfornetworkingI/Odevices
is ully supported with the Intel 82598 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller and Broadcom 57710 and 57711 10 Gigabit
Ethernet Controller. It is experimentally supported or storage I/O devices with the QLogic QLA25xx 8Gb Fibre Channel,
theEmulexLPe120008GbFibreChannel,andtheLSI3442e-Rand3801e(1068chipbased)3GbSASadapters.
Increased NFS Datastore SupportESXnowsupportsupto64NFSsharesasdatastoresinacluster.
CPU enhncmnts
Resource Management and Processor Scheduling
The ESX 4.0 scheduler includes several new eatures and enhancements that help improve the throughput o all workloads,
with notable gains in I/O intensive workloads. This includes:
Relaxedco-schedulingofvCPUs,introducedinearlierversionsofESX,hasbeenfurtherfine-tunedespeciallyforSMPVMs. ESX4.0schedulerutilizesnewfiner-grainedlockingthatreducesschedulingoverheadsincaseswherefrequent
scheduling decisions are needed.
Thenewschedulerisawareofprocessorcachetopologyandtakesintoaccounttheprocessorcachearchitectureto
optimizeCPUusage.
For I/O intensive workloads, interrupt delivery and the associated processing costs make up a large component o the
virtualization overhead. The above scheduler enhancements greatly improve the eciency o interrupt delivery and
associated processing.
Mmoy enhncmnts
Hardware-assisted Memory Virtualization
Memory management in virtual machines difers rom physical machines in one key aspect: virtual memory addresstranslation. Guest virtual memory addresses must be translated rst to guest physical addresses using the guest OS's
page tables beore nally being translated to machine physical memory addresses. The latter step is perormed by ESX
by means o a set o shadow page tables or each virtual machine. Creating and maintaining the shadow page tables
addsbothCPUandmemoryoverhead.
Hardware support is available in current processors to alleviate this situation. Hardware-assisted memory management
capabilitiesfromIntelandAMDarecalledEPTandRVI,respectively.Thissupportconsistsofasecondlevelofpage
tables implemented in hardware. These page tables contain guest physical to machine memory address translations.
ESX4.0introducessupportfortheIntelXeonprocessorsthatsupportEPT.SupportforAMDRVIhasexistedsinceESX3.5.
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Figure 1 illustrates eciency improvements seen or a ew example workloads when using hardware-assisted
memory virtualization.
Whilethishardwaresupportobviatestheneedformaintainingshadowpagetables(andtheassociatedperformanceoverhead)
it introduces some costs o its own. Translation look-aside bufer (TLB) miss costs, in the orm o increased latency, are higher
withtwo-levelpagetablesthanwiththeone-leveltable.Usinglargememorypages,afeaturethathasbeenavailablesince
ESX 3.5, the number o TLB misses can be reduced. Since TLB miss latency is higher with this orm o hardware virtualization
assist but large pages reduce the number o TLB misses, the combination o hardware assist and large page support that
exists in vSphere yields optimal perormance.
Stog enhncmnts
A variety o architectural improvements have been made to the storage subsystem o vSphere 4. The combination o
the new paravirtualized SCSI driver, and additional ESX kernel-level storage stack optimizations dramatically improves
storage I/O perormance with these improvements, all but a very small segment o the most I/O intensive applications
become attractive targets or VMware virtualization.
VMware Paravirtualized SCSI (PVSCSI)
Emulated versions o hardware storage adapters rom BusLogic and LSILogic were the only choices available in earlier ESX
releases. The advantage o this ull virtualization is that most operating systems ship drivers or these devices. However, this
precludes the use o perormance optimizations that are possible in virtualized environments. To this end, ESX 4.0 ships
withanewvirtualstorageadapterParavirtualizedSCSI(PVSCSI).PVSCSIadaptersarehigh-performancestorageadapters
thatoergreaterthroughputandlowerCPUutilizationforvirtualmachines.Theyarebestsuitedforenvironmentsinwhichguest applications are very I/O intensive.
PVSCSIadapterextendstothestoragestackperformancegainsassociatedwithotherparavirtualdevicessuchasthenetwork
adapterVMXNETavailableinearlierversionsofESX.Aswithotherdeviceemulations,PVSCSIemulationimproveseciencyby:
Reducingthecostofvirtualinterrupts
BatchingtheprocessingofI/Orequests
BatchingI/Ocompletioninterrupts
A urther optimization, which is specic to virtual environments, reduces the number o context switches between
theguestandVirtualMachineMonitor.EciencygainsfromPVSCSIcanresultinadditional2xCPUsavingsforFibre
Channel(FC),upto30percentCPUsavingsforiSCSI.
Apache Compile
60%
50%
40%
30%
0%
10%
Eciency Improvement
20%
SQL Server Citrix XenApp
Efficiency Improvement
Figure 1 Efficiency improvements using hardware-assisted memory virtualization
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VMware recommends that you create a primary adapter or use with a disk that will host the system sotware (boot disk)
andaseparatePVSCSIadapterforthediskthatwillstoreuserdata,suchasadatabaseormailbox.Theprimaryadapter
will be the deault or the guest operating system on the virtual machine. For example, or virtual machines with
MicrosoftWindows2008guestoperatingsystems,LSILogicisthedefaultprimaryadapter.
iSCSI Support Improvements
vSphere 4 includes signicant updates to the iSCSI stack or both sotware iSCSI (that is, in which the iSCSI initiator runs at
the ESX layer) and hardware iSCSI (that is, in which ESX leverages a hardware-optimized iSCSI HBA). These changes ofer
dramatic improvement o both perormance as well as unctionality o both sotware and hardware iSCSI and delivering
signicantreductionofCPUoverheadforsoftwareiSCSI.EciencygainsforiSCSIstackcanresultin7-26percentCPU
savings or read, 18-52 percent or write.
S/W iSCSI
1.2
1
0.8
0.6
0
0.2
LSI Logic
pvscsi
0.4
Protocol
Fibre Channel
PVSCSI Efficiency of 4K BlockI/0s
HW iSCSI
60
50
40
30
0
10
Read
Write
20
SW iSCSI
iSCSI % CPU Efficiency Gains, ESX 4 vs. ESX 3.5
Figure 2 Efficiency gains with PV SCSI adapter
Figure 3 iSCSI% CPU Efficiency Gains, ESX 4 vs. ESX 3.5
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Software iSCSI and NFS Support with Jumbo Frames
vSphere4addssupportforJumboFrameswithbothNFSandiSCSIstorageprotocolson1Gbaswellas10GbNICs.
The 10Gb support or iSCSI allows or 10x I/O throughput more details in networking section below.
Improved I/O Concurrency
Asynchronous I/O execution has always been a eature o ESX. However, ESX 4.0 has improved the concurrency o the
storagestackwithanI/OmodethatallowsvCPUsintheguesttoexecuteothertasksafterinitiatinganI/Orequestwhile
theVMkernelhandlestheactualphysicalI/O.InVMwaresFebruary2009announcementonOracleDBOLTPperformance
the gains attributed to this improved concurrency model were measured at 5 percent.
Ntoking enhncmnts
Signicant changes have been made to the vSphere 4 network subsystem, delivering dramatic perormance improvements.
VMXNET Generation 3
vSphere4includes,VMXNET3,thethirdgenerationofparavirtualizedNICadapterfromVMware.NewVMXNET3features
overpreviousversionofEnhancedVMXNETinclude: MSI/MSI-Xsupport(subjecttoguestoperatingsystemkernelsupport)
ReceiveSideScaling(supportedinWindows2008whenexplicitlyenabledthroughthedevice'sAdvancedconfigurationtab)
IPv6checksumandTCPSegmentationOffloading(TSO)overIPv6
VLANoff-loading
LargeTX/RXringsizes(configuredfromwithinthevirtualmachine)
Network Stack Performance and Scalability
vSphere 4 includes optimizations to the network stack that can saturate 10Gbps links or both transmit and receive side
networkI/O.TheimprovementsintheVMkernelTCP/IPstackalsoimprovebothiSCSIthroughputaswellasmaximum
network throughput or VMotion.
vSphere 4 utilizes transmit queues to provide 3X throughput improvements in transmit perormance or small packet sizes.
vSphere4supportsLargeReceiveOoad(LRO),afeaturethatcoalescesTCPpacketsfromthesameconnectionto
reduceCPUutilization.UsingLROwithESXprovides40percentimprovementinboththroughputandCPUcosts.
1 VM 4 VMs 8 VMs
100%
80%
60%
0%
20%
Gains Over ESX 3.5
40%
16 VMs
Network Transmit Throughput Improvement
Figure 4 Network Transmit Throughput Improvement for vSphere 4
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rsouc Mngmnt enhncmnts
VMotion
PerformanceenhancementsinvSphere4reducetimetoVMotionaVMbyupto75percent.
Storage VMotion Performance
Storage VMotion is now ully supported (experimental beore) and has much improved switchover time. For very I/O
intensive VMs, this improvement can be 100x. Storage VMotion leverages a new and more ecient block copy mechanism
calledChangedBlockTracking,minimizingCPUandmemoryresourceconsumptionontheESXhostuptotwotimes.
During SPECjbb (ACTIVE)
Seconds(lowerisbet
ter)
600.00
500.00
400.00
300.00
0.00
100.00
4GB ESX 3.5
4GB ESX 4
200.00
After SPECjbb (IDLE)
Elapsed VMotion Time
Storage VMotion Time
ESX 3.5 ESX 4
1200
1000
800
600
0
200
400
Figure 5 Decreased Storage VMotion Time
20 VM Provisioning Time
ESX 3.5
1200
1000
800
600
0
200
400
ESX 4
Figure 6 Improved VMFS Performance
Figure 7 Performance Enhancements Lead to a Reduced Time to VMotion
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VM Provisioning
VMFS perormance improvements ofer more ecient VM creation and cloning. This use case is especially important
with vSpheres more ambitious role as a Cloud operating system.
Pfomnc Mngmnt enhncmnts
Enhanced vCenter Server Scalability
As organizations adopt server vir tualization at an unprecedented level, the need to manage large scale virtual data
centers is growing signicantly. To address this, vCenter Server, included with vSphere 4, has been enhanced to manage
up to 300 hosts and 3000 virtual machines. You also have the ability to link many vCenter Servers in your environmentwith vCenter Server Linked Mode to manage up to 10,000 virtual machines rom a single console.
vCenter Performance Charts Enhancements
PerformancechartsinvCenterhavebeenenhancedtoprovideasingleviewofallperformancemetricssuchasCPU,
memory, disk, and network without navigating through multiple charts. In addition, the perormance charts also
include the ollowing improvements:
Aggregatedchartsshowhigh-levelsummariesofresourcedistributionthatisusefultoidentifythetopconsumers.
Thumbnailviewsofhosts,resourcepools,clusters,anddatastoresallowforeasynavigationtotheindividualcharts.
Drilldowncapabilityacrossmultiplelevelsintheinventoryhelpsin isolatingtherootcauseofper formance
problems quickly.
Detaileddatastorelevelviewsshowutilizationbyfiletypeandunusedcapacity.
appliction Pfomnc
Oracle
VMwaretestinghasshownthatrunningaresource-intensiveOLTPbenchmark,basedonanon-comparable
implementationoftheTPC-C*workloadspecication,OracleDBinan8-vcpuVMwithvSphere4achieved85percentof
native perormance. This workload demonstrated 8,900 database transactions per second and 60,000 disk input/outputs
persecond(IOPS).TheresultsdemonstratedinthisproofpointrepresentthemostI/O-intensiveapplication-based
workload ever run in an X86 vir tual environment to date.
*Thebenchmarkwasafair-useimplementationoftheTPC-Cbusinessmodel;theseresultsarenotTPC-Ccompliantresults,andnot
comparabletoocialTPC-Cresults.TPCBenchmarkisatrademarkoftheTPC.
25
ESX 3.5
512 VM Boot Storm (FCP)
ESX 4
20
15
0
5
10
512 VM Boot Time(Fibre Channel)
Figure 8 Time to Boot 512 VDI VMS
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The results above were run on a server with only eight physical cores, resulting in an 8-way VM conguration that was not
under-committingthehost.TheslightlylesscommittedfourvCPUcongurationranat88percentofnative.
SQL Server
RunninganOLTPbenchmarkbasedonanon-comparableimplementationoftheTPC-E*workloadspecication,aSQL
ServervirtualmachinewithfourvirtualCPUsonvSphere4.0showed90percenteciencywithrespecttonative.The
SQLServerVMwitha500GBdatabaseperformed10,500IOPSand50Mb/sofnetworkthroughput.
SAP
VMwaretestingdemonstratedthatrunningSAPinaVMwithvSphere4scaledlinearlyfromonetoeightvCPUs
perVMandachieved95percentofnativeperformanceonastandard2-tierSAPbenchmark.Thismulti-tieredapplication
architectureincludestheSAPapplicationtierandback-endSQLServerdatabaseinstantiatedinasinglevirtualmachine.
2-processor 4-processor 8-processor
3
3.5
4
4.5
2.5
2
1.5
0
0.5
ESX 4
Native
1
ESX 4 Oracle DB VM Throughout,as Compared to 2-CPU Native Configuration
*Thebenchmarkwasafair-useimplementationoftheTPC-Cbusinessmodel;theseresultsarenotTPC-Ccompliantresults,and
notcomparabletoocialTPC-Cresults.TPCBenchmarkisatrademarkoftheTPC.
Figure 9 Comparison of Oracle DB VM Throughput vs. 2-CPU Native Configuration
1 cpu 2 cpu
RelativeScalingR
atio
4 cpu
3
4
2
0
Native
VMware VM
1
ESX 4 SQL Server VM Throughput,
as Compared to 1 CPU Native Configuration
Figure 10 Comparison of vSphere 4 SQL Server VM Throughput vs. Native Configuration
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Exchange
Microsot Exchange Server is one o the most demanding applications in todays datacenters, save the very largest databases
beingdeployed.PreviousworkonvirtualExchangedeploymentsshowedVMwaresabilitytoimproveperformance
rom native congurations by designing an Exchange architecture with a greater number o mailbox instances running
ewer mailboxes per instance.
WiththeperformanceenhancementsaddedtovSphere4singleVMExchangemailboxeshavebeendemonstrated
at up to 8,000 mailboxes per instance. This means that Exchange administrators will have the option o choosing the
higher perorming smaller mailboxes or the more cheaply licensed large mailbox servers.
1 cpu 2 cpu
RelativeScalingR
atio
4 cpu 8 cpu
6
8
4
0
Native
VMware VM
2
ESX 4 SAP VM Throughout,as Compared to1 CPU Native Configuration
1 VM 2 VMs
95percentilelate
ncy(ms)
Users(Thousands)
4 VMs 6 VMs 8 VMs
6
7
8
9
5
4
3
0
1
2
200
250
300
150
100
0
50
Users (thousands) 95 percentile latency
#VCPUs >#PCPUs
ESX 4 Exchange Mailbox Count and Latency
Figure 11 Comparison of ESX 4 SAP VM Throughput vs. Native Configuration
Figure 12 vSphere performance enhancements with Microsoft Exchange
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Summy
VMware innovations continue to make VMware vSphere 4 the industry standard or computing in data centers o all sizes
and across all industries. The numerous perormance enhancements in VMware vSphere 4 enable organizations to geteven more out o their virtual inrastructure and urther reinorce the role o VMware as industry leader in virtualization.
vSphere represents dramatic advances in perormance compared to VMware Inrastructure 3 to ensure that even the
most resource intensive and scale out applications such as large databases and Microsot Exchange email systems can
run on private clouds powered by vSphere.
rfncs
Performance Evaluation of AMD RVI Hardware Assist
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/RVI_performance.pdf
Performance Evaluation of Intel EPT Hardware Assist
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_ESX_Intel-EPT-eval.pdf
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/RVI_performance.pdfhttp://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_ESX_Intel-EPT-eval.pdfhttp://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_ESX_Intel-EPT-eval.pdfhttp://www.vmware.com/pdf/RVI_performance.pdf8/9/2019 Vsphere Whatsnew Performance Wp
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VMware, Inc. 3401 Hillview Ave Palo Alto CA 94304 USA Tel 877-486-927 3 Fax 650-427-50 01 www.vmware.com
Copyright 2009 VMware, Inc. All rights reserved. This product is protected by U.S. and international copyright and intellectual
property laws. VMware products are covered by one or more patents listed at http://www.vmware.com/go/patents.
VMware is a registered trademark or trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other
marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies. VMW_09Q1_WP_vSpherePerformance_P13_R1