May 7-8th  Citrix Summit

Citrix Summit is where you’ll want to be this year when thousands of IT professionals converge in San Francisco. Come and learn about the best solutions for virtualization and cloud computing and how to lead your customers through the labyrinth of virtual work styles and cloud convergence. In two packed days of technical sessions, demos, learning labs and sales strategies, you’ll become ‘tech savvy’ and in the know on the evolution from the PC Era to the Cloud Era.

http://www.citrixsummit.com/

May 9-11th  Citrix Synergy

At Citrix Synergy you’ll hear from hundreds of industry experts, solutions vendors and key analysts presenting market insights, IT innovations and business trends. Benefit from the visionary keynote of Citrix President, Mark Templeton, attend sessions on the full suite of Citrix solutions and meet with your customers to share the entire conference experience.

Citrix Synergy provides intense training on the newest technologies and will give you the expertise to answer your customers’ toughest questions and meet their needs with the latest IT solutions.  Sigma’s own Elias Khnaser, Sigma Solutions’ Technology Officer, will present on Citrix XenDesktop on May 11^th.  Register now to see him live!

http://www.citrixsynergy.com/

Register Here Now!

Contact your Sigma representative if you’re interested in attending!

Highlights include:

-Sharepoint Tech Fest hosted at InnoTech
-Microsoft Technology Symposium and Microsoft Partner Pavilion
-IT Executive Forum and Luncheon hosted by CIO Magazine Executive Council

Conference Tracks include:

-Cloud Computing/Infrastructure
-Mobile Applications
-Security
-Social Networking for Business

What is InnoTech?

InnoTech is a regionally focused business to business technology conference & expo.

InnoTech offers a unique opportunity for business and technology leaders to educate themselves about current trends and discover new, successful, innovative best practices. InnoTech focuses on the innovative uses of both mainstream and locally developed technologies to grow and enhance your business operations.

More Information

Contact your Sigma representative if you’re interested in attending.

Last time we covered the compute tweaks and configurations necessary when virtualizing tier-1 applications. Let’s now examine the rest of the stack:

Memory
I am often asked if memory speed matters when making a purchase, whether it will increase performance. I get asked that a lot, especially for VDI, and my answer is a resounding “No!” I would much rather go for more memory than to go with less memory at a higher speed level.

That being said, when configuring memory for a virtual machine make sure that you reserve the full memory allocated for that VM. Again, tier-1 applications require a bit more finesse in order to ensure quality of service and performance.

Network
Have you heard the phrase “it’s never the network”? network admins always joke around that their stuff is rock-solid and it is never the network’s fault. Well, that is true to some extent with tier-1 applications. Still, there are a few things you can tweak:

Virtual switch load balancing policies – If you are wondering what policy to use for the vSwitch that will give you the best performance, I am telling you right now that I have yet to see an environment where the default policy was not more than enough. Sure, you can always use the IP Hash policy, but that presents complexity and you have to make sure you have EtherChannel properly configured on your physical switches if you go down that path. My recommendation is stay with the default on this one.

NetIOC – Many admins have shied away from enabling Network IO Control, for demanding applications. I strongly urge you to enable that setting. Tier-1 applications require a certain level of quality of service that we can only guarantee if we enable it.

Separate IP Storage Network – NFS is great, IP storage is becoming very popular, but I have to stress physical and logical separation of the IP storage network, have dedicated physical NICs, have dedicated physical switches, and design it for performance, availability and resilience. Once again, remember that the objective here is tier-1 applications — when those go down, you get calls from people you usually don’t get calls from so don’t design it inappropriately.

Watch out for vMotion Bandwidth – vSphere 5 now is capable of handling monster VMs, up to a 1TB. That is a lot of memory. When designing vMotion take into consideration those monster VMs that might not necessarily be 1TB of memory, but are larger than average. These VMs require a lot more bandwidth to move around, so don’t do it over 1GB networks, 10GB is good, multiple 10GB is better. If you ask me, InfiniBand is even better.

Disable Interrupt Coalescing – Uusing ethtool you can disable interrupt coalescing, which can boost your network performance quite a bit. Of course, when you do that you are lowering latency at the expense of increased bandwidth. For demanding applications that are latency-sensitive like databases, mail servers, terminal servers and XenApp servers, etc., it’s a good setting to disable and you can absorb the increased bandwidth resulting from that setting being shut off.

Storage
The big evil storage … if not configured properly, storage can be the root cause of most of the issues you have in your virtualized environment. It’s even more true when it comes to demanding applications. It’s time to break down the barrier between you and your storage admin — you’re now friends and the cold war days of owning the stack are long gone. Storage admins need to know about virtualization as much as virtualization admins need to understand storage. vSphere offers significant storage capabilities as follows:

Alignment — Older operating systems like Windows Server 2003 need their virtual disks aligned. Tom Hirt at TCPdump.com discusses this topic in great detail here. One thing to note is that if you are using Windows Server 2008 or later you do not need to worry about alignment at the operating system level.

Snapshots – Wwe all love snapshots. They make our lives easier, but don’t take a snapshot and leave it forever. A snapshot should have a purpose; once it outlives its usefulness, delete it. Why? Because aging snapshots grow in size and can have a negative effect on your VM’s performance.

RDM vs. VMDK – Many blogs are torn on the issue of whether to use RDMs over VMDK and vice versa. From a performance perspective, you will not see a noticeable difference between them. From a manageability perspective, though, VMDKs are easier to manage. Where RDMs become a problem is when you start to creep up on the maximum LUNs per ESX host, which is 255.

You also want to chat with your storage admin, especially if you are using Fiber Channel storage so that all these LUNs being attached don’t over run the port they are connected on. Queue depths come into play as well here. For optimized performance, I strongly recommend you have your storage admin get involved when going down this route. I am not implying that you should never use RDMs; I actually like them and use them in most environments especially when I want to present a large LUN to a VM or if I am using Microsoft Clustering Services.

Multi-pathing – I cannot stress enough the need to have multi-pathing enabled and configured properly on your ESXi hosts, and I don’t mean round-robin here — I am talking about true multi-pathing.

SIOC – Storage IO control should be enabled as well, which will allow you to maintain quality of service levels for those demanding applications.

VAAI – vSphere APIs for Array Integration should be enabled and used wherever and whenever possible, especially with block (FC and iSCSI). That being said, VAAI is now also available for NFS as well with vSphere 5, so I strongly recommend that you check your array and if it supports VAAI, then use it. VAAI will significantly improve performance of your tier-1 applications.

RAID Configuration – Understanding the profile of the application will help you place the application on a datastore configured to handle its IO needs. Don’t approach storage from a capacity perspective alone; understand the physical limitations and what you need to get more performance out of your storage. RAID levels are important, so place the application correctly.

Spindle Count – If RAID is important, then your spindle count is even more important. A 600GB 16k SAS drive will give you the same IOPS as a 140GB 15k SAS drive; so, again, capacity is not a problem, it is making sure we have enough horsepower in pool to match the requirements of the application. Otherwise , it will run slow, and the user experience will be bad and you will hear voices saying “this application cannot be virtualized; let’s put it back on physical hardware…” Let’s avoid these conversations — we can virtualize better than 95 percent of all applications if we do it right.

Lately, I have been fielding many questions regarding how to virtualize tier-1 applications. While many organizations have gone down the route of server virtualization, many have also shied away from tier-1 applications for many reasons. Some still have pre-conceived opinions dating back to the early days of server virtualization where the technology was not ready to tackle these types of workloads. And then there are those organizations that have attempted to virtualize tier-1 applications and have been unsuccessful for the simple reason of not possessing the right knowledge to do so.

In this two-part post, I take you through the process of virtualizing tier-1 applications — what to look for in order to achieve the results you want.

Before I get down into the technical part, I want to stress a point that many seem to be ignoring: Understating the minimum, maximum and recommended settings of an application is critical as you try and virtualize it.

The reason I bring this up is because I hear, on a daily basis, things like: Why should I virtualize Exchange, or SQL? .. Or SharePoint? … They require so many resources that it is better to put them on a physical machine. I will not go into the traditional benefits of server virtualization — you should be well aware of that. Instead, you should focus on understanding the consolidation ratios for demanding applications, which is not as high as regular servers. So, don’t expect the 25:1 ratios, but that’s OK. Even if you virtualize at ratios of 2:1 or 3:1, you’re doing much better.

Let’s look at an example: If you are using an HP DL580 with four sockets and 10 cores, that is a total of 40 cores. With hyperthreading, you now have 80 threads — that is a monster machine and a favorite for demanding applications.

Considering that the maximum CPU that Exchange can address is 12 cores, you can easily have three instances of Exchange on this server. So, again: Understanding the system requirements of the application is the first step in the process.

Now, let’s examine the different technologies in the stack and the recommended configurations for virtualizing demanding applications. The components of the stack include CPU memory, network, and storage and VM virtual hardware configuration. So, let’s tackle CPU.

HWmmu — Make sure your processor has support for hardware-assisted memory management unit (MMU), this is important especially with demanding applications. Most of the new processors extend support for this technology as follows:

• Intel Extended Page Tables (EPT): Nehalem processors or better
• AMD Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI): Shanghai processor or better

BIOS settings

• NUMA: Enabled
• Hyperthreading: Enabled
• Power Management: Disabled. This is especially important in blade systems, it can lead to latency and can be detected with demanding applications, VDI, Citrix XenApp, Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, etc.
• Turbo: Enabled

Physical Server Platform

• If you will assign a VM 8 vCPUs or more, make sure that your physical server platform has at least 4 sockets, demanding VMs require a platform that can satisfy their needs, 8 vCPU VM can put a heavy burden on the hypervisor scheduler, as a result a bigger system is advisable
• Use vSphere 4.1 or newer; 4.1 introduced significant updates to the hypervisor scheduler which would enhance demanding applications access to compute resources

Next time, we look at the remaining stack components. Meanwhile, please do share your comments on what you have done to virtualize demanding applications and what your success or failure efforts.

In compiling the list, CRN editors worked with the UBM Channel research group and a team outside experts to define the most customer-beneficial technical certifications in the IT channel.  These technical certifications have enabled solution providers to deliver the most premium products, service and support to their North American customers.

“The 2012 Tech Elite 250 list recognizes an exclusive group of Solution Providers that have shown a dedication to helping customers innovate while reducing costs,” said Kelley Damore, Vice President, Editorial Director at UBM Channel.  “By identifying and adapting to the skills and training needed to best serve today’s customers, members of the Tech Elite 250 have proven their commitment to delivering the products and services that today’s end-users value most.”

A sample of CRN’s 2012 “Tech Elite 250” list is featured in the February issue of CRN Magazine and online at www.crn.com.

“Sigma is honored to be included on this prestigious list,” said John Flores, Sigma’s Vice President of Marketing. “Sigma Solutions prides itself on superiority in customer solution delivery. Being named to the Tech Elite 250 amidst our transformation from a product centric model to a services oriented model further establishes Sigma as a leader in the industry.”