Paper: VMware vCloud Director Performance and Best Practices

In September last year VMware announced the vCloud Director, a management platform for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds powered by VMware vSphere 4.1.

Now VMware has published a paper titled: VMware vCloud Director 1.0 Performance and Best Practices. The paper which contains 32 pages covers four areas regarding the vCloud Director performance: sizing guidelines and software requirements, best practices for performance and tuning, performance characterization for key vCloud Director operations and behavior with low bandwidth and high latency networks.

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The paper covers the following topics:

  • Experimental Setup covering the setup used
  • Sizing for Number of Cell Instances, tested with up to 12 cell instances with 10 fylly loaded vCenter Server instances.
  • LDAP Sync from external LDAP servers,
  • Open Virtualization Format (OVF) File Upload
  • Deploying vApp with fence or without fence mode
  • Inventory Sync
  • Adjusting Thread Pool and Cache Limits

Conclusion:

  • Ensure the inventory cache size is big enough to hold all inventory objects.
  • Ensure the JVM heap size is big enough to satisfy the memory requirement for the inventory cache and memory burst so the vCloud Director server does not run out of memory.
  • Import LDAP users by groups instead of importing individual users one by one.
  • Ensure the system is not running LDAP sync too frequently. The vCloud database is updated at regular intervals.
  • In order to help load balance disk I/O. separate the storage location for OVF uploads from the location of vCloud Director server logs.
  • Have a central datastore to hold the most popular vApp templates and media files and have this datastore mounted to at least one ESX host per cluster.
  • Be aware that the latency to deploy a vApp in fence mode has a static cost and does not increase proportionately with the number of VMs in the vApp.
  • Deploy multiple vApps concurrently to achieve high throughput.
  • For load balancing purposes, it is possible to move a VC Listener to another vCloud Director instance by reconnecting the vCenter Server through the vCloud Director user interface.