Vmware has relased Performance Best Practices for vSphere 5 and its available by clicking the download link below this short summary. This is a book designed to help system administrators obtain the best performance from vSphere deployments.
VMware addressed many of the new features in vSphere 5.0 from a performance perspective. These include:
- Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (Storage DRS), which performs automatic storage I/O load balancing
- Virtual NUMA, allowing guests to make efficient use of hardware NUMA architecture
- Memory compression, which can reduce the need for host-level swapping
- Swap to host cache, which can dramatically reduce the impact of host-level swapping
- SplitRx mode, which improves network performance for certain workloads
- VMX swap, which reduces per-VM memory reservation
- Multiple vMotion vmknics, allowing for more and faster vMotion operations
VMware also significantly updated and expanded many of the topics covered in previous editions of the book. These include:
- Choosing hardware for a vSphere deployment
- Power management
- Configuring ESXi for best performance
- Guest operating system performance
- vCenter and vCenter database performance
- vMotion and Storage vMotion performance
- Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and Distributed Power Management (DPM) performance
- High Availability (HA), Fault Tolerance (FT), and VMware vCenter Update Manager performance