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Posts tagged Performance
Hyper-V Support Made Easy in Red Hat Enterprise 5.9
Sep 25th
If you are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux you’ll find great support for Hyper-V as a standard feature in the new minor Linux 5.9 release for which a beta became available recently.
Running Linux distributions with native Hyper-V support will save you the trouble of separately installing Hyper-V Integration Components to provide support for multiple cores and synthetic drives for mouse, video, network and storage. The Hyper-V Linux drivers were recently accepted upstream by the Linux community. For Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 this means running as a guest on Hyper-V will improve overall performance.
Windows 8 Storage & Hyper-V part 4 – Offload Data Transfer (ODX)
Apr 11th
This is another installment in my series on Windows 8 Storage & Hyper-V. Previous blogs in the series can be found here:
Part 3 – The Art of Creating a VHD
Another promising new storage functionality that can be found in Windows Server 8 is the new transparent fast copy feature called Offload Data Transfer or ODX. If you know VMware’s vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI), you probably know where to place ODX because it is more or less in the same league.
What’s the Challenge?
If you have a large Hyper-V guest with multi-Terabyte VHDX files, it depends on the amount of memory, the activity of the VM and the available bandwidth how long it takes to Live Migrate that VM to another node in your Hyper-V cluster. However, it is an entirely different story if you also need to move these very large VHDX files from one disk to another, from one array to another, from one cluster to another or even from one cloud to another. It would take ages doing this the classic way. Every read and every write including its confirmation would have to go through the sending server and the receiving server. Even if there would only be one Hyper-V server involved (copying between two CSV’s on the same server) this is highly inefficient. After all the VHD(X) is already on the storage array. Why let the data travel all the way from CSV1 through server A to server B and then back to CSV2 again? Why would the data have to leave the storage array at all?
HP P6000 EVA and Microsoft Hyper-V
Jun 21st
In a recent technical brief HP zooms in on the new HP P6000 Enterprise Virtual Array combined with
Hyper-V. The paper discusses a number of topics related to HP’s new storage array:
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Thin Provisioning
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LUN Migration
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FC, iSCSI and FCoE
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Performance
The speed of creating a Fixed Sized VHD
Jun 1st
Today I had to deliver a few 500GB Fixed Sized VHD’s in our Nobel Hyper-V Cloud Datacenter. The job had to be finished in a few hours involving provisioning the LUN, presenting them to the hosts, creating the VHD, adding the VHD to the Virtual Machines and prepare/format the disks for final use within the VM. Of course this had to be done without downtime to the users. Another very easy job but let me warn you: “It takes a bit of time!”
The VM’s involved were two Exchange 2010 DAG servers, the one in our Hilversum datacenter on an HP BL460G6 blade server connected to HP EVA enterprise grade storage with dozens of FC 450GB 15K disks and the other in the customer’s datacenter in Amsterdam, which serves as a DR site. The DR site has no HP EVA storage and there is no replication. We use a few single Hyper-V ProLiant ML370 servers with a bunch of local 1TB FATA storage. We backup to a local DPM2010 server in Hilversum and replicate that to a second DPM2010 server in Amsterdam. So recovery can be relatively fast.
How about speed?
Creating a 500GB fixed sized VHD on the EVA storage took only 49 minutes or almost 10 times faster.
Creating a 500GB fixed sized VHD on the Direct Attached Storage (DAS) on the recovery Hyper-V Server where the DR instance of the Exchange 2010 VM lived took a little over 8 hours.
Of course this is not a problem but very costly if the customer has to pay by the hour.
I was happy to have started the fixed disk creation the evening before so when I looked this morning both VM’s were ready and waiting to be used.
Vital Signs for Hyper-V Server (part 2)
May 19th
After my previous blog post announcing Vital Signs for Hyper-V server by Savision, I received some additional information (including an opportunity for MVP’s to request an NFR license).
Vital Signs for Hyper-V provides a real-time performance monitoring and troubleshooting capability for Windows Hyper-V Server. The agentless dashboard deploys in minutes and allows System Administrators to immediately see dozens of key performance graphs and configuration for Hyper-V Host (CPU, Memory, Disk, Network) and Virtual Guest.
Stop Waiting, Start Fixing Dynamic Hyper-V Problems
Stop waiting up to 15 minutes for the next polling cycle or remoting into a machine to see its current performance. Get everything you need to troubleshoot every alert or incident in seconds.
One Dashboard, Over 100 Real-time Metrics
Immediately collect all the foundational troubleshooting information to zero in on the root cause faster to ensure hyper-v fabric is functioning well.
Snapshots, Storage, and V-Systems
Instantly track snapshots paths, storage configuration and storage throughput in real-time. Drill into the Virtual Guest OS to understand its performance characteristics. Troubleshoot the most difficult performance problems faster.
Eliminate Capacity Guesswork
Automatically calibrate and quickly tune performance in your environment to understand virtual guest to hyper-v host usage.
Real-time for Microsoft’s Private Cloud (System Center + Hyper-V)
See SCOM Alerts and SCSM incidents, problems and changes, correlated and placed directly to the real-time performance charts.
If you have any additional questions or would like access to our internet-accessible demo environment, please contact: Dan Merritts @ dan.merritts@savision.com; +1-415-480-0366.
Learn more at: http://www.savision.com/hyper-v
For MVP’s:
Contact Dan Merritts for your MVP NFR License Key: dan.merritts@savision.com; +1-415-480-0366.
Vital Signs for Hyper-V Server for Hyper-V
May 17th
After yesterday’s big announcement by Veeam, another management tool vendor Savision (known for Live Maps in System Center Operations Manager and Configuration Manager) releases a major management tool for Hyper-V.
Here’s a copy of Savision’s announcement today:
Real-time Performance Troubleshooting for Microsoft’s Private Cloud
Virtualization is ubiquitous. More companies than ever are virtualizing major workloads into Microsoft’s Private Cloud solution built atop Hyper-V Server. Mission critical applications rely on the performance of this virtualized solution. Hyper-V is complex and changes dynamically. Manually diagnosing, troubleshooting and resolving Hyper-V performance problems is nearly impossible.
Without a real-time view into both the Hyper- V server’s and its virtualized hosts’ health, configuration changes, dynamic re-allocations, IT Pros are left frustrated when trying to resolve problems. Vital Signs for Hyper-V is the answer. With its real-time performance, configuration, event views and informative graphical interface designed by Hyper-V experts, you are able to immediately identify performance problems, visually correlate significant events and configuration changes to immediately start resolving problems.
Hyper-V Perfomance Analysing with PAL
May 17th
Currently I am attending Tech-Ed North America 2011 in Atlanta. In one of the sessions held today by Mark Ghazai and Peter Meister a tool called Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) was mentioned. Unfortunately for me the session was too long and there was no time to discuss this tool. The tool can be downloaded at Codeplex, it is free and in my opinion a very easy way in getting an insight into the performance of your Hyper-V environment.
Project Description
Ever have a performance problem, but don’t know what performance counters to collect or how to analyze them? The PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs) tool is a powerful tool that reads in a performance monitor counter log and analyzes it using known thresholds.
Features
- Thresholds files for most of the major Microsoft products such as IIS, MOSS, SQL Server, BizTalk, Exchange, and Active Directory.
- An easy to use GUI interface which makes creating batch files for the PAL.ps1 script.
- A GUI editor for creating or editing your own threshold files.
- Creates an HTML based report for ease of copy/pasting into other applications.
- Analyzes performance counter logs for thresholds using thresholds that change their critieria based on the computer’s role or hardware specs.
To use PAL
The PAL tool is primarily a PowerShell script that requires arguments/parameters passed to it in order to properly analyze performance monitor logs.
Requirements
Operating Systems:
Tested on Windows 7, but should run on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 R2.
Required Products (free and public):
- PowerShell v2.0 or greater.
- Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1
- Microsoft Chart Controls for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5
Improving network performance for Hyper-V R2 virtual machines on HP blade servers
Dec 22nd
How can we dramatically improve the network communication between two Hyper-V R2 virtual machines in HP blade servers?
Many of our customers have started using HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosures with ProLiant G6 or G7 blade servers. For the network interconnect they use HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 or FlexFabric blade modules which are ideally connected to the outside world via 10Gb Ethernet network switches. In a less ideal world multiple 1Gb connections can be combined to form a fatter trunk to redundant 1Gb Ethernet core switches.
So much for the cabling! As soon as we dive into the blade enclosure, all network communication stays within the confines of the blade enclosure with its multi-terabit signal backplane.
So how on earth can two virtual machines on two different physical Hyper-V R2 blade servers within this same enclosure only communicate at the speed of only 20 to 30MB per second? Conversely, how can we get them back to a much more acceptable speed? If you want to find out, I invite you to read on.
Let me first explain how the different components work together.
In the following diagram we see an HP c7000 Blade Enclosure with several blade servers, two Virtual Connect Flex-10 or FlexFabric blade modules which are each connected to a core Ethernet switch.
A Hyper-V R2 server cannot have enough network adapters. With the latest generation of blade servers we don’t need to fill up the enclosure with a switch pair for each network module or mezzanine. The dual-port 10Gb Ethernet onboard modules can be split into 2 x 4 FlexNICs. Speeds can be dynamically assigned in 100Mb increments from 100Mb to 10Gb.
So the Parent Partition on the Hyper-V R2 server sees 8 network adapters at the speed set in the Virtual Connect server profile. We set up at least three NIC teams for management, virtual machines and cluster communication (heartbeat, live migration, cluster shared volumes). The onboard network adapters in the blade server are from Broadcom and the teaming software used is HP Network Configuration Utility (NCU).
Until last week we used the NCU 10.10.0.x teaming software which allowed us to use native VLANs (see previous blogs). What the older versions have in common is the ultra low speed of VM to VM communication with this particular combination of hardware.
Because we wanted to find out we setup a test configuration with above configuration. The Hyper-V servers were Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 with SP1 (release candidate).
The network performance tests were conducted with NTttcp. This is a multi-threaded, asynchronous application that sends and receives data between two or more endpoints and reports the network performance for the duration of the transfer.
We setup two Windows Server 2008 R2 Virtual Machines with 1 vCPU, 1Gb of memory, 1 Virtual Machine Bus Network Adapter (with IC 6.1.7601.17105) and two VHD’s, one dynamic VHD for the OS and one fixed-sized VHD for the test. No changes were made to the physical or virtual network adapter in terms of TCP and other hardware offloads. We simply kept the defaults.
Test 1: VM to VM on same Hyper-V R2 host in same blade enclosure
| Broadcom driver on host | 5.2.22.0 |
| Teaming software on host | NCU 10.10.0.x |
| Teaming type | Network Fault Tolerance with Preference Order |
| Network speed | 2 x 4Gb (Effectively 4Gb) |
| Total MB Copied | 1342 |
| Throughput in Mbps | 3436 |
| Result | Excellent |
| Method | Average of 10 tests |
Test 2: VM to VM on two different Hyper-V R2 hosts in same blade enclosure
| Broadcom driver on host | 5.2.22.0 |
| Teaming software on host | NCU 10.10.0.x |
| Teaming type | Network Fault Tolerance with Preference Order |
| Network speed | 2 x 4Gb (Effectively 4Gb) |
| Total MB Copied | 1.342 |
| Throughput in Mbps | 319 |
| Result | Awful |
| Method | Average of 10 tests |
Via my HP contacts we learnt that HP has been working to improve network performance specifically for HP BladeSystem, Virtual Connect and the FlexNIC network adapters. It turned out that the slow speeds occurred on the LAN on Motherboard (LOM) B, C and D only. So LOM 1:a and LOM 2:a appeared to perform well. If you don’t split your networks into multiple FlexNICs you wouldn’t have noticed any degradation. However, in a Hyper-V cluster environment you need many more networks.
In this iSCSI connected server we use three teams:
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LOM 1:a + 2:a Management_Team (Domain access; managing Hyper-V hosts)
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LOM 2:a + 2:b VM_Team (for Virtual Machine communication)
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LOM 3:c + 3:c Cluster_Team (Live Migration, Cluster Shared Volumes)
The remaining two ports are used to create a MPIO bundle for connection to the iSCSI network.
Because the VM_Team is on LOM B, we suffered very low performance when two VM’s living on different Hyper-V hosts.
To see if the newly built drivers and teaming software (released on december 19th) we updated the Broadcom drivers and the NIC teaming software. The same tests were executed to see the difference.
Test 1: VM to VM on same Hyper-V R2 host in same blade enclosure
| Broadcom driver on host | 6.0.60.0 |
| Teaming software on host | NCU 10.20.0.x |
| Teaming type | Network Fault Tolerance with Preference Order |
| Network speed | 2 x 4Gb (Effectively 4Gb) |
| Total MB Copied | 1342 |
| Throughput in Mbps | 4139 (+21,7%) |
| Result | Excellent |
| Method | Average of 10 tests |
Test 2: VM to VM on two different Hyper-V R2 hosts in same blade enclosure
| Broadcom driver on host | 6.0.60.0 |
| Teaming software on host | NCU 10.20.0.x |
| Teaming type | Network Fault Tolerance with Preference Order |
| Network speed | 2 x 4Gb (Effectively 4Gb) |
| Total MB Copied | 1342 |
| Throughput in Mbps | 1363 (+426%) |
| Result | Good |
| Method | Average of 10 tests |
Although we haven’t tested and compared all LOMs we feel quite confident that network bandwidth is now distributed in a more even way across the different FlexNICs.
Performance characterization report for Microsoft Hyper-V R2 on HP StorageWorks P4500 SAN storage
Jul 18th
HP has published a technical whitepaper focusing on the performance characterization of the disk sub-system for HP StorageWorks P4500 21.6TB SAS Multi-site SAN Solution (HP P4500 SAN), addressing questions a customer may have about deploying Microsoft’s Hyper-V R2 virtual machines (VMs) on HP ProLiant BL490c G6 Virtualization Blades (ProLiant BL490c G6) with HP P4500 iSCSI SAN storage device for backend storage.
Target audience: The intended audience includes, but is not limited to, individuals or companies who are interested in the use of Hyper-V R2 virtualization technology for consolidation and migration of servers to ProLiant BL490c G6 servers with HP P4500 SAN storage solutions.
This white paper describes testing performed in April 2010:
http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA1-9557ENW.pdf
Happy customer with Hyper-V R2 and HP LeftHand storage
May 11th
My colleague Bert de Reus sent me a stimulating email. He has been implementing Hyper-V R2 at a customer site with HP ProLiant G6 servers and HP LeftHand storage (virtualization bundle).
The customer had an aging HP ProLiant ML350 G3 with seven U320 SCSI disks and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 holding several databases. A typical query on a 70GB database located on a Hyper-V Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) lasted 1 hour and 38 minutes.
The newly implemented infrastructure consists of a 3-node Hyper-V R2 cluster using HP ProLiant DL380 G6 with 8 cores and 64GB of memory and two HP LeftHand P4500 boxes with a total of 24 450GB 15K SAS disks. The databases were moved to a VM with 4 vCPU’s and 4GB of RAM. The operating system was Windows Server 2008 x64 SP2 and the database was leveled up to SQL Server 2008 x64 SP1.
The exact same query took only 7 minutes.
The customer was extremely impressed with this 14-fold performance improvement.
Extra information (November 11th, 2009)
A second database test was even more rewarding: A query which normally took 2,5 hours was cut back to only 12 minutes (15.8x faster)
Databases were consolidated from several physical servers to four virtual SL Server 2008 SP1 x64 virtual machines.
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