QLogic 2600 Series vSphere 5 Virtual Server Engine - Manual (Page 3)

Best Practices in vSphere 5.1
No hardware resource is more important to overall performance
than memory. Plan to ensure each VM has the memory it needs,
but without wasting memory in the process.
Memory
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.
However, these new capabilities bring new complexities, and with them the need to plan new data center
architectures. This not only includes planning the deployment for today’s needs, but also thoroughly
investigating evolution strategies for applications before bolting down racks and filling them with servers.
Planning which applications are going to run on your virtualized servers is the first step in understanding your
needs. From there, it is critical to define server integration points with existing resources (likely core
switching and storage resources), and how these will be affected by the evolution of existing resources. After
that, planning your approach to vMotion® and capacity growth over the lifetime of your new infrastructure
will help you scope internal I/O requirements
appropriately.
Finally, determining whether to utilize
converged networks or not, and what I/O
performance you need, will enable you to
intelligently discuss your I/O and networking
options with your SAN/LAN equipment
providers. These steps will help you ensure
success when virtualizing your Tier-1
applications.
To fully optimize virtualized data centers,
servers need maximum I/O capacity to support high input/output operation rates and high bandwidth
applications. Increased bandwidth is also needed for server virtualization, which aggregates I/O from multiple
virtual machines (VMs) to the host’s data path. This next-generation combination takes full advantage of new
features that are described in detail in this planning guide. Read on to discover how QLogic can increase your
infrastructure ROI and overall competitiveness.