Optimizing Server Performance and Capacity: 5 Free Methods for both Physical and Virtual (VMware) Servers

Since Veloxum makes its business around server optimization to increase the performance and capacity of physical and virtual servers, people often ask us, “Do you have any free advice on how we can increase the performance and capacity of our servers?” For these people I often provide the following five (5) often overlooked free methods.

1.      Make sure your VMware tools are up-to-date on all guests. VMware’s engineers, like many others, continually improve VMware’s performance release-to-release. You cannot take advantage of those improvements if you run older versions.

2.      Place identical operating systems on the same host.  This simple tip can increase memory sharing significantly.

3.      Using iSCSI?  Have you setup your environment for JUMBO MTUs?  If your environment supports it, you can expect a 40% or greater improvement in sustainable I/O.

4.      Using shared storage?  Use vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) if possible. Review  http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1005009  and  http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1021976 for more details

5.      Another shared storage tip, perform regular virtual machine snapshot maintenance. Keep only the ones that you need - remove them if at all possible.

Lastly, one monitoring tip I always recommend: enable logging level “3” in vCenter. Several latency (delay) metrics are not available unless you do this. As you search for your own ways to increase performance these metrics will help you spot trouble areas.