CPU & memory resources are two resources that are not fully understood in vSphere, and they are two resources that are often wasted, as well. Eric Siebert has written a nice article that takes a look at CPU & memory resources in vSphere to help you better understand them and provide some tips for properly managing them.
CPU usage is not like memory usage, which often utilizes all the memory assigned to it for things like pre-fetching. The real problem with assigning too many vCPUs to a VM is scheduling. Unlike memory, which is directly allocated to VMs and is not shared (except for TPS), CPU resources are shared and must wait in a line to be scheduled and processed by the hypervisor which finds a free physical CPU/core to handle each request. Handling VMs with a single vCPU is pretty easy: just find a single open CPU/core and hand it over to the VM. With multiple vCPU’s it becomes more difficult, as you have to find several available CPUs/cores to handle requests.
When it comes to memory, assigning too much is not a good thing and there are several reasons for that. The first reason is that the OS and applications tend to use all available memory for things like caching that consume extra available memory. This makes the hypervisors job of managing memory conservation, via features like TPS and ballooning, more difficult. Another thing that happens with memory is when you assign memory to a VM and power it on; you are also consuming additional disk space. The hypervisor creates a virtual swap (vswp) file in the home directory of the VM equal in size to the amount of memory assigned to a VM (minus any memory reservations). The reason this happens is to support vSphere’s ability to over-commit memory to VMs and assign them more than a host is physically capable of supporting. Once a host ’s physical memory is exhausted, it starts uses the vswp files to make up for this resource shortage, which slows down performance and puts more stress on the storage array.
CPU and memory seem like trivial things in a vSphere environment, but it is important to get them right the first time to ensure maximum performance.
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Tags: VMware, Performance