The Mouse Jiggler

I ran across something on Amazon today that I did not know existed.  It is called the Mouse Jiggler.  It is a small USB stub that you connect to your system and it shows up as a mouse.  It will send signals to the system at regular intervals to make it seem to the system that somebody is moving or jiggling the mouse.

You might ask - Why would anybody want something that does that?

The answer is further down the page in the Q and A:

"Will this keep my Outlook Lynx indicator "Green"?"

"Yes it will."  Translation - Oh yes, sweet Jesus, it will keep it green all day long.

Watch / Listen To Your Extreme Favorites from VMworld

All of the VMworld sessions from this year have been posted directly to YouTube this year.  In the past they were available from the VMworld site, but being on YouTube makes it a lot easier to see your favorite sessions again, see the ones that didn't fit, or experience them all for the first time if you weren't able to attend.

One of my favorite Canadians was kind enough to put together a blog post that has all of the Extreme Performance Series sessions linked on one page.  This is the series that I have been honored to be a part since it started a few years ago and focuses on performance oriented sessions.

This year my sessions were Monster Database Virtual Machine Performance and Reducing Latency in Enterprise Applications Caused by Hairpinning with VMware NSX.  The first one is about running the largest possible virtual machines with Oracle and SQL Server databases.  We have cool graphs and best practices included.  The second is about how virtual networking with our NSX product has some performance advantages over physical networking in some use cases.

(A quick note for my mom - it would be cool if you could just click on the two links for my sessions.)

Monster Oracle Database Virtual Machines

I recently finished a whitepaper on the performance of really big Oracle database virtual machines. I highly recommend that you take a look at the paper for the full details, but a quick summary is that performance of large database virtual machines is good.  This round of testing was using vSphere 6.5 on four generations of four-socket Intel based servers.  The biggest size virtual machine that could be run without using any of the hyperthreads was tested on each host and compared:

As the power of servers has increased, the performance of large virtual machines has also increased.

Another way of looking at the performance increases is to keep the size of the virtual machine the same, and move it from older to newer hardware.  Specifically if you compare the performance of the same 40vCPU VM on Westmere-EX vs Broadwell-EX you find an increase in performance of 42%:

The older Westmere-EX based server had 10 cores per socket, so the 40 vCPU VM was using all the cores.  The newer Broadwell-EX based server has 24 cores per socket, so the 40 vCPU VM fits easily.  So in addition to the 40 vCPU VM performing 42% better, there is also room for more VMs on the Broadwell-EX server.  CPU utilization of the Broadwell-EX server was just 42% when the 40 vCPU VM was fully utilized because the host has 96 cores.

So Say SMEs Cover CMDs/Sec

Our performance counter of the week is a key storage related metric - CMDs/Sec.  This is part of our new effort to cover a a new performance counter every week - along with a little bit of other virtualization and cloud stuff as needed.  We secretly hope to make you all esxtop performance experts.

So Say SMEs and CoStop Performance Counter

This week on So Say SMEs, Kong and I discuss what the costop or %costop performance counter means and how you can use it to resolve performance issues on your vSphere / ESXi environment.  You can view costop in esxtop on the main CPU screen that comes up by default.

Intro to CPU Ready Time in ESXTOP

This week in our So Say SMEs episode we have a quick discussion about the CPU Ready time performance counter in esxtop.  This has been covered by some other great blogs and esxtop performance guides.  Here we have a quick intro conversation and also talk about the Super Bowl - because we have to talk about the Super Bowl.

So Say SMEs Returns for Third Season

Kong and I have returned for a third season of So Say SMEs.  We have a few changes for season 3, but we will continue to talk cloud and virtualization with some geek and sports talk too.  In terms of changes - Kong has moved over to SolarWinds and we going to focus a bit more on performance when we get the chance.

 My voice is still not 100% in this video, but that is a story for another day!