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Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts week 05
For a lot of people it has been a crazy week. Some of you might wonder why, some of you know what I’m talking about. VMware Partner Exchange 2010. With PEX coming up for many of you that means GTJD, GTJD? Yeah, Getting The Job Done! Being away for a week in my case means I need to wrap up project and answer a lot of emails before it gets out of control. That doesn’t however mean that I don’t have time to create a top-5.... This weeks list contains the all-star bloggers:
- Scott Drummonds - PVSCSI and Low-IO Workloads
At low IOPS the CPU is doing very little work to access storage
hardware.  In these environments it is simply not worth anyone’s time
to implement and use a special driver storage driver.  But when 10-50k
IOPS are streaming through the virtual SCSI bus, a new approach that
halves the number of cycles spent on each IO will noticeably decrease
CPU utilization.  This is why we created PVSCSI. The current design of PVSCSI coalesces based on OIOs only, and not
throughput.  This means that when the virtual machine is requesting a
lot of IO but the storage is not delivering, the PVSCSI driver is
coalescing interrupts.  But without the storage supplying a steady
stream of IOs there are no interrupts to coalesce.  The result is a
slight increase to latency with little or no efficiency gain.
- Frank Denneman - Sizing VMs and NUMA nodes
ESX is NUMA aware and will use the NUMA CPU scheduler when detecting a
NUMA system. On non-NUMA systems the ESX CPU scheduler spreads load
across all sockets in a round robin manner. This approach improves
performance by utilizing as much as cache as possible. When using a
vSMP virtual machine in a non-NUMA system, each vCPU is scheduled on a
separate socket.
- Jason Boche - Configure VMware ESX(i) Round Robin on EMC Storage
The answer was buried on page 88.  The nmp roundrobin setting useANO is
configured by default to 0 which means unoptimized paths reported by
the array will not be included in Round Robin path selection unless
optimized paths become unavailable.  Remember I said early on that
unoptimized and optimized paths reported by the array would be a key
piece of information.  We can see this in action by looking at the
device list above.  The very last line shows working paths, and only
one path is listed for Round Robin use – the optimized path reported by
the array.
- Scott Lowe - Using IP-Based Storage with VMware vSphere on Cisco UCS
From the VMware side of the house, since you’re using 10GbE end-to-end,
it’s very unlikely that you’ll need to worry about bandwidth; that
eliminates any concerns over multiple VMkernel ports on multiple
subnets or using multiple NFS targets so as to be able to use link
aggregation. (I’m not entirely sure you could use link aggregation with
the 6100XP interconnects anyway. Anyone?) However, since you are
talking Cisco UCS you’ll have only two 10GbE connections (unless you’re
using the full width blade, which is unlikely).
- Gabe - Licensing problems with VMware VIEW4
The problem Jon was facing, was that it was impossible to just add
those 20 (2×10) licenses to vCenter without assigning them to a host.
Because, in our believe, there should just be 20 licenses in some sort
of pool that each VDI VM would take one license from. It is possible to
assign multiple hosts to one license so they can share the number of
available VMs in that license. What you can’t do is have a host connect
to more than one license, which in our opinion would also be feasible.
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Read More | Posted: February 7, 2010 | By: Wissen Schwamm
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This free software can analyze and benchmark many kinds of hardware, such as CPU performance, hard disk performance, video system information, mainboard information, and many more. |
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Read More | Posted: February 7, 2010 | By: Wissen Schwamm
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Microsoft DirectX is a group of technologies designed to make Windows-based computers an ideal platform for running and displaying applications rich in multimedia elements such as full-color graphics, video, 3D animation, and rich audio. DirectX includes security and performance updates, along with many new features across all technologies, which can be accessed by applications using the DirectX APIs. |
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Read More | Posted: February 5, 2010 | By: Wissen Schwamm
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This DirectX SDK release contains updates to tools, utilities, samples, documentation, and runtime debug files for x64 and x86 platforms. |
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Read More | Posted: February 5, 2010 | By: Wissen Schwamm
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This download provides the DirectX end-user multi-languaged redistributable that developers can include with their product. The redistributable license agreement covers the terms under which developers may use the Redistributable. This package is localized into Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Swedish, and English. |
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Read More | Posted: February 5, 2010 | By: Wissen Schwamm
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SAP Batch Job Performance on vSphere
An included part of every SAP system is the SGEN transaction that is used to recompile all the objects in the system after every system update. This job is run by SAP Basis administrators after a fresh install or upgrade of SAP and requires users to be offline, hence the task should perform as quickly as possible to minimize downtime. SGEN has a parallel processing design that is also inherent in other SAP business batch jobs. SGEN should not be confused with the standardized and popular SAP SD benchmark that is representative of OLTP performance and is used as the basis for the standard SAPS rating.
To get a quick measure of how best practices could impact performance of SAP batch jobs in vSphere VMs, I started with some un-optimized VMs to get a baseline. I then applied a series of best practices to the VM and measured their effect on the performance of the SGEN transaction. The time for the SGEN transaction to complete went from 2500 seconds down to about 800 seconds, showing how much of an impact best practices can have on the performance of an intensive batch process.
The server used was a Dell PowerEdge M710 with 2 x quad core Intel Xeon X5570 2.93 GHz processors, 72 GB of Memory, and running VMware vSphere 4. Two 4 vCPU VMs were created and configured with SuSE Enterprise Linux 10 64-bit. Oracle 10.2.0.2 was installed in the first VM. The second VM was configured as a SAP application server with NetWeaver 7.0 ABAP. In this two-VM configuration, the SGEN transaction was run on the app server VM which in turn accessed the DB VM during the processing of the jobs. The SAP_BW set of objects was used for this set of tests.
The first set of best practices applied were VMware specific. The second were specific to SAP and were made by adjusting the profile settings for the SAP application server instance. The final adjustment was to give the app server VM more resources. The chart below shows the results as each change was made:
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Baseline: 4vCPUs, e1000, 10 Dialog Work Processes |
Install VMTools |
Upgrade to VMXNET 3 |
Increase Dialog Work Processes to 20 |
Increase Dialog Work Processes to 30 |
Increase vCPUs to 8 and  Work Processes to 40 |
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Time to Complete SGEN Transaction (Seconds) |
2491 |
2421 |
1451 |
1097 |
1021 |
813 |
There are several jumps in performance. The first is the upgrade to use the VMXNET 3 virtual adapter instead of the default e1000 adapter. In this network intensive application where lots of packets are passed between the app and DB VMs, the better performance of the VMXNET 3 adapter makes a big difference.
The other big jump in performance comes with the increase in the number of dialog work processes for the application instance. By monitoring the CPU utilization with "top" inside the guest, "esxtop" from the ESX console, and the SAP dialog queue (with SAP’s dpmon tool) it was clear that the VM was not working very hard with its initial configuration of 10 processes. By increasing SAP dialog instance work processes until the CPU of the app server VM was nearly saturated, the time for the SGEN job to complete improved greatly.
While the CPU utilization of the app server VM was high, the DB VM was still only about half utilized. To push more work over to the DB VM, the number of vCPUs on the app server VM was increased from 4 to 8 and the number of work processes was also increased to 40. This change resulted in another decrease in the SGEN completion time. In the vSphere Performance Best Practices Guide (page 21), it states that a VM with a number of vCPUs less than or equal to the number of cores in each NUMA node will be able to take advantage of NUMA optimizations and have the best performance. This SGEN workload is CPU intensive enough to get continued performance improvement even as the number of vCPUs (8) exceeds the number of cores in a NUMA node(4). However to really determine if this is the "best performance" another test would need to be run to compare a single 8vCPU app server VM with two 4vCPU app server VMs.
These tests show that applying both VMware and SAP best practices can make a big difference in performance. In workloads that are resource intensive, such as the SAP SGEN transaction, using the best performing virtual NIC and adjusting key application settings based on performance monitoring are key to achieving best performance. |
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Read More | Posted: February 5, 2010 | By: Wissen Schwamm
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Northwest-based technology firm chooses Microsoft over Oracle and SAP to help unify data from partners and offices in 23 countries. |
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Read More | Posted: February 5, 2010 | By: Wissen Schwamm
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AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced the introduction of the ATI Radeon™ HD 5450 graphics card, the latest addition to the award-winning line-up of ATI Radeon™ HD 5000 Series graphics cards. The ATI Radeon HD 5450 graphics card delivers a state-of-the-art HD multimedia1 and game experience at a value price. Sharing the same leading edge fe.. |
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Read More | Posted: February 4, 2010 | By: Wissen Schwamm
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FREMONT, Calif., Feb. 4, 2010 and ROMANEL-SUR-MORGES, Switzerland, Feb. 5, 2010 — Logitech International (SIX: LOGN) (NASDAQ: LOGI) today announced that Erik Bardman, Logitech senior vice president, finance and chief financial officer, will present at the Thomas Weisel Partners Technology & Telecom Conference 2010 in San Francisco on Feb. 8, 2010 at 3:15 p.m. Pacific Standard Time/6:15 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. A live webcast and replay will be available on the Logitech corporate Web site at http://ir.logitech.com.
About Logitech
Logitech is a world leader in personal peripherals, driving innovation in PC navigation, Internet communications, digital music, home-entertainment control, gaming and wireless devices. Founded in 1981, Logitech International is a Swiss public company traded on the SIX Swiss Exchange (LOGN) and on the Nasdaq Global Select Market (LOGI).
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Logitech, the Logitech logo, and other Logitech marks are registered in Switzerland and other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. For more information about Logitech and its products, visit the company’s Web site at www.logitech.com.
(LOGI – IR) |
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Read More | Posted: February 4, 2010 | By: Wissen Schwamm
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Read More | Posted: February 4, 2010 | By: Wissen Schwamm
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Novato, California (February 4, 2010) - Sonic Solutions® (NASDAQ: SNIC) today announced financial results for the third quarter of its 2010 fiscal year. For the three months ended December 31, 2009, net revenue was $26.4 million, operating expenses were $18.9 million, and the net loss was $0.3 million, or $(0.01) per share, all in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles ("GAAP"). For the nine months ended December 31, 2009, net revenue was $78.0 million, operating expenses were $55.5 million, and the net loss was $2.4 million, or $(0.09) per share, also on a GAAP basis. |
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Read More | Posted: February 4, 2010 | By: Wissen Schwamm
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