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!

Flash Cache at Chuy's

As Kong continues his job search we found a place that was hiring for this week's episode of  So Say SMEs. Chuy's is of course the perfect place to discuss the new vSphere Flash Read Cache feature aka vFRC.



I decided to wear a vintage work shirt this week - from a company that no longer exists.  Anybody remember Altiris?

Let The TPC-VMS Benchmark Wars Begin

In the benchmark world, the Transaction Processing Performance Council (aka TPC) has long been the owners of the premier performance benchmark.  I'm referring to the TPC-C database performance benchmark where millions have been spent to prove performance excellence.

A new benchmark from TPC that is designed to focus on the performance of virtualized databases was created called TPC-VMS.  And very recently the first TPC-VMS result was published by HP using vSphere 5.5.

This means that the HP and VMware vSphere solution has the "Leadership" position for the TPC-VMS benchmark - as of right now.

What happens next will be interesting.

The first published result establishes the target for everybody else.  Will there be a bunch of publications over the coming months?  Each a little bit better.  Or will it take some time for anybody to be able to surpass this initial publication?

It is also of course possible that nobody else will ever publish a TPC-VMS result.  Sometimes new benchmarks just never get established.  If this is the case, then vSphere would hold the number one position forever.  But this isn't what we want.

Ideally the healthy competition of a benchmark fosters innovation, software and hardware improve, costs come down, and customers benefit.

VMworld and Fantasy Football 2013

Bringing together VMworld and Fantasy football for 2013.  I also answer some of our critics with a bold statement.  We are not only about enterprise solutions and football.

ESXTOP in The Hands On Labs At VMworld 2013

I'm one of the captains for the performance module of the Hands on Labs at VMworld this year.  This means that I got to really geek out and create a new module that focuses on using esxtop.  For really in depth performance analysis on ESXi - esxtop is my favorite.  Come by the Hands On Labs in Moscone South this week take SDC-1304 Optimizing for Performance.  All of the modules are great - but my new esxtop module is number six.  Skip straight to it by using the table of contents once the lab has started.

The labs are currently only available onsite at VMworld, but will be made available through the public Hands on Labs portal at some point after the conference ends.  So if you couldn't make it to VMworld this year - don't despair, you will be able to get to the new labs in the future.

Software Defined Is Everywhere

Kong and I returned to So Say SMEs with this new episode about Software Defined EVERYTHING.  While the term is definitely a bit over-used right now, we talk about it anyway and use it a bit more, making it  even more over-used. Hopefully we also get the heart of what it actually means.



Kong did not send me the memo on wearing a cool Hawaiian shirt.  Maybe next time.

Do You Know Who I Am?

Just how long will it be before we get the mug shot photo?  We've all seen the celebrity mug shot after they are arrested for late night hijinx.

Once you hit the really big time your every move is followed closely.  There are twitter storms and blogs and even official news reports.  Unfortunately, it inevitably leads to an attempt to use fame to get around the norms and rules of society.

Imagine the scenario....

After a late night of hanging out at the Hands On Labs at a local VMUG, our celebrity guru blogger and author will get stopped on his way into the backstage area of the labs.  He just wants to grab a slice of the free pizza for the lab techs.  The security guy wants to see his badge.  The badge doesn't have the right color dot.

"Do You Know Who I Am?"

Unfortunately, this security guy has never installed ESX or vCenter or vCD.  He's never read about resource pools or pondered the best SRM strategy.  He just wants to see the red dot on the badge.

......

It even made this week's episode of So Say SMEs in Virtualization and Cloud!

Vote for Half of The Tong Show

In this week's So Say SMEs aka the Tong Show, we talked about VMworld 2013 Session Public Voting.



My sessions up for vote this year are 5591 Big Data: Virtualized SAP HANA Performance, Scalability and Best Practices and 5517 Performance In The Cloud Doesn't Matter.  Easiest way to find them is to just go to the voting site and filter on my last name - Muirhead.

Cloud Bracket Busters AWS and Hybrid Cloud

On this week's episode of So Say SMEs, Kong and I discuss the new announcement from VMware of a Hybrid Cloud service in the spirit of March Madness.


Notice the cool circuit board design on the wall behind us - anybody know where we filmed this episode?

Performance Perception In The Cloud

A funny thing seems to happen when applications are run in the "cloud" instead of just "virtual" in your local datacenter.  The perception of performance is changed.

As a part of my job, we look almost everyday at the performance of applications running in Virtual Machines.  We sometimes compare this performance against applications running natively on hardware and sometimes we are just measuring response time or looking for lost cycles.  Even small differences of less than a percent are important and improvements of whole percentages are celebrated.

Customers like to get into detailed discussions about how much "overhead" virtualization brings.  Settings and configuration options in vSphere that they can use to squeeze out every last drop are given in whitepapers, presentations, and blogs.  This is the kind of stuff that I consider fun and interesting.

But when we discuss running applications in the "cloud" the aspects of performance that are important change.  Even though all clouds are enabled by a virtualizaiton layer with virtual machines running around on top, the performance concern is almost always only about scaling.  Can additional instances be spun up to meet customer demand in real time?  Can storage capacity be expanded infinitely into the future?  There is absolutely no discussion about virtualization "overhead".

I believe that there are many reasons for this difference in perception.  Some of these reasons even make logical sense, but I don't think that the logical aspect is what is driving this difference in view.

It is primarily driven by the completely different approach that true "cloud" computing brings.  The underlying infrastructure is being turned over to somebody else, and the customer is simply purchasing a service.  While in the virtualization world, the underlying infrastructure is still under the control of the person making the decisions.  Even though both a cloud and a virtualized data center will be using the same virtualization approach, it is only the virtualized data center that is questioned about "overhead".

Interesting to me that the evaluation of performance is so different between these two.

Database Evolution Revolution

An excellent blog by Chuck Hollis today really got me thinking about databases.  In Chuck's post (on Chucks's Blog) he relates a presentation by Charles Fan that was recently given.  From Databases to Dataclouds is the title and a good overall summary of the blog / presentation.

After reading it my initial reaction is that this seems like a total revolution in how data is used and harnessed.  We are now talking about being able to use new database technologies and techniques to mange, control, and analyze data in near real-time.  Time-to-decision in seconds.  Data literally flowing all around us and yet captured, analyzed, and understood in real-time.

We would all like to see the world move on from relational databases to a totally new approach - a revolutionary approach.  But the reality is that the relational database will continue to be the key core aspect of just about any data intensive effort.  Additional features and optimization will continue to be added.  Entirely new ways to deal with and manage data can be used in conjunction.  But the core strengths of relational databases (transactions come to mind) will continue to make them indispensable.

I believe that what we are seeing is an evolution in database software combined with an evolution in hardware performance which adds up to a revolution when seen together.

When you take this and use it on top of the revolution that virtualization has created, you end up with a paradigm shifting view of the world.  Even though Chuck's blog is kinda long, I recommend that you read it through and see if it makes you start thinking too.

So Say SMEs: Little Things Can Be Big Later

In this week's episode of So Say SMEs, Kong and I discuss how small strategic additions can be big later.  We also manage to relate this to football - as usual.

A production note - the door behind us didn't open a single time during filming (unlike last week).  Although there were a couple of people that started to walk towards us right at the end, but finished before they were able to get on camera.

Super Bowl and Content Deduplication

On this week's episode of So Say SMEs, Kong and I discuss the end of the football season and content de-duplication.

If you watch you will see that the door behind us kept opening.  Normally we just roll with these types of events on So Say SMEs, but in the case the noise from the servers was too loud and we had to wait for the door to close again before continuing.  Awesome work by the team of video editors to put things right.

The Hitchhikers Guide To ESXTOP Counters

For all the other performance people out there that spends time using esxtop to do deep analysis of ESX performance, there is a great document that you really should know about.  It is called vSphere Monitoring and Performance for vSphere 5.1 / vCenter 5.1 / ESX 5.1.

My favorite section is a detailed list of all the esxtop counters and exactly what they mean and how they inter-relate.

For example, I had a question about what is the difference between the %USED and %RUN for a VM.  On page 155 and 156 of this great document it gives you the specific formula for %USED, which is:

%USED = %RUN + %SYS - %OVLP

It also explains in the %RUN definition that on systems with hyperthreading enabled, the %RUN value does not account for hyperthreading.  This can cause %RUN to be twice as large as %USED.  But wait this can't be possible based on the formula - except in this case it is because %USED accounts for hyperthreading.

Another mystery of the universe is solved with the help of the vSphere Monitoring and Performance guide.