1. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
Performance, Capacity Planning and
Efficiency in a Virtualized World
Dan Sylvester
Manager, Pre-Sales
Scalar West

2. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
 Introduction
 Performance Management
 vCenter Operations Manager
 NetApp OnCommand Balance

3. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
Background in architecting mission-critical
data centre infrastructure
Founded in 2004
$140M in FY14
Revenues
Nationwide Presence
140 Employees
Nationwide
25% Growth YoY
Toronto | Vancouver | Ottawa
Calgary | London | Montreal
Greater than 1:1
technical:sales ratio

4. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
 Scalar is an Official
Supplier to the
TORONTO 2015 Pan
Am/Parapan Am Games
for IT security, data
centre integration, and
managed storage
services
 #1 Canadian ICT
Security Company on
the Branham300

5. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
How Is It Running?
 Bottleneck Analysis and
Remediation
 Performance Optimization
 Capacity Planning

6. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience

7. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
Performance Management

8. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
What does this really mean?
Why is it happening?
What should you do?

9. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
vCenter Ops Manager

10. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
 vCenter Operations
collects metrics from
vCenter and provides a
holistic view with deep
insights into health,
risk and efficiency
 vCenter Operations
catches unusual
behavior and detects
potential performance
bottlenecks early on
before end users notice
 vCenter Server collects
real time performance
data from vSphere
vCenter Operations Management Suite

11. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
Overview
 Comprehensive management
for virtual infrastructure with
health, risk and efficiency
scores
 Single pane of glass for
integrated performance,
capacity and configuration
management
Benefits
 End-to-end visibility into virtual
infrastructure health
 Ensure service levels for IT
services
 Optimize for efficiency and cost
Immediate
Problems
Future
Problems
Opportunities
to Optimize

12. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
CPU Demand is the bottleneck

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Check related Events to find any
changes to the VM

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Let’s look at
capacity
shortfalls
Very low on
capacity

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Current capacity
cross-over point
Actual VMs
deployed
VM count
capacity
Capacity state
today
New capacity
shortfall if I add
10 new VMs

16. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience

17. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
 Symptoms/Current State:
– VM feels sluggish
– Database is not responding fast enough
 Assumptions
– Must be out of memory – CPU utilization is low
– Currently have 16GB of RAM, Can I get
another 16?

18. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
 Findings
– vCOPs says the VM is overprovisioned – only
need 8 GB of RAM
– Metrics indicate disk bottleneck
– Did you know your C drive is sitting at 99%
utilization?
 Corrective Action
– Re-size VM’s OS drive
– Problem solved

19. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
NetApp OnCommand
Balance

20. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
Heterogeneous OS Support
Multi-vendor, Multi-protocol Support (SAN, iSCSI, NAS/NFS, CIFS)
Agentless, Easy Install
Powerful AnalyticsIntelligence Instead of Data

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Highlights What You
“Need to Know”
 Abnormal and
critical events
 Storage in Trouble
 VMs in Trouble
 Virtual Hosts in
Trouble
 Physical Servers
in Trouble

22. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
On New Dashboard:
 Virtual Machines
 Virtual Hosts
 Arrays
 Physical Servers
 Switches
 Databases

23. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
 Alerts on abnormal and critical performance issues
 Analysis identifies root cause (bully) of performance issue
and affected VMs or hosts (victims)

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25. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience

26. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
Management
Solution Certified
Insight Balance

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Performance Index of ESX Server
Sweetspot = 100

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 Scheduled and on-
demand reports
 Automated scorecards
provide consistent
metrics
 Dozens of drill-down
reports
– Virtual Machine
Scorecard shows how
the infrastructure is
supporting the VM
– Server Volume
Capacity Utilization
Forecast tells you
when you’ll run out
Server Volume Capacity Utilization Report

29. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
 Symptoms/Current State:
– Poor database performance
– Physical server running Solaris/Oracle DB
– Storage System is extremely busy
– VMs running on the same spindles
 Assumptions:
– Storage subsystem can’t keep up
– VMs may be impacting performance of the DB

30. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
 Findings
– DB server is creating as many IOPs as all VMs
in their environment
– DB server is labeled as a “bully” by Insight
Balance
– Victims are actually VMs and a second
physical DB Server
– Cache Miss is clocked at 40%
– iSCSI errors – 1 per second occurring

31. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
 Corrective Actions
– Move Lower Priority VMs from SAS to SATA
– Resize server side disk cache
– Scheduling to apply iSCSI patch
– Undersized disk cache was the problem but
iSCSI errors don’t help the situation either

32. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
 Single Metrics aren’t enough to root cause
 Intelligent, analytical systems can bring focus
 Faster time to resolution
 Become more proactive than reactive by
anticipating problems before they happen

33. © 2014 Scalar Decisions Inc. Not for distribution outside of intended audience
THANK YOU.