Official With SAP SD Benchmarks

It is rare to see official traditional benchmarks published on virtualization, but in the case of SAP it is happening.

A couple of weeks ago, HP published an SAP Three-Tier SD benchmark on vSphere 5 and an HP VirtualSystem.  This was a big system made up of 11 physical servers, hosting one "Monster" database VM and 20 application server VMs.  The result was a 2x increase in the number of users vs the previous SAP three-tier benchmark that was published on vSphere 4.1 (which was also an awesome result).

If go back a couple more months, Fujitsu published an SAP two-tier SD benchmark on vSphere 5 that used a single "Monster" VM.  The rules and definition of what a two-tier benchmark limits it to a single VM, which in vSphere 5 can now support up to 32 vCPUs.  The really interesting wrinkle in this publication was that Fujitsu also published a native two-tier SD on the same hardware and software stack.  These two official results showed that virtual performance within 6% of native.

Using the official SAP SD benchmark results the capability and performance of vSphere as a platform for SAP can be considered.  The large three-tier environment clearly shows how much vSphere has grown in terms of capability from the previous version.  The two-tier results show a clear comparison between virtual and native, with the difference being relatively small.

These official benchmarks are strong proof points for running SAP (and other important stuff) on vSphere 5.

How Rosie O'Donnell and Microsoft Conspired Against Me

It seems that in order to get to the bottom of a problem, and really understand what is going on, you have to be willing to continue to dig.  When I got to the bottom of my problem with Rosie O'Donnell, it turned out that Microsoft had assisted in a silent search and replace conspiracy.

I'm one of the creators and maintainers of the open source DVD Store database test kit and application.  Dave Jaffe and I created it for internal tests and then decided to enhance it a bit more and release it as open source in about 2005.  If you like to do database testing, you should really try it out.

As part of the data for this test database we created a program that generates fake titles and actors for the DVDs in our test database.  We take real names and then mix them up and recombine them to create all of our fake names.  We have a bunch of first names - TOM, ROSIE, BRAD - and we have a bunch of last names - CRUISE, O'DONNELL, PITT.  These are then randomly combined to create lots of names.  So we would have ROSIE CRUISE, BRAD O'DONNELL, and TOM PITT for example.

This same set of data has been in use with the DVD Store for at least 7 years, but this week I found out something new -  Not all apostrophe's are created equal.

When editing a data load file, with vi on Linux, that had our fictional actors names in it, I noticed that instead of an apostrophe we had the following O<92>DONNELL.  This was consistent throughout the file every time O'DONNELL was supposed to appear.

I looked at the same file on Windows in notepad and it appeared correctly - O'DONNELL.  The strange this was that if you used the keyboard to type a single quote (the key just to the right of the semicolon key) that the character it produced looked slightly different than the on next to the O in O'DONNELL in the file.

Why was Rosie O'Donnell causing these problems with an apostrophe that wasn't an apostrophe?

It turns out that it is Microsoft's fault.  It is a known issue for those that are into these types of things.  Microsoft will replace an entered single quote character with a "Microsoft Apostrophe" that is coded as a 92.  Microsoft will then display this as something that looks more like a real apostrophe, but at the cost of putting a non-defined character code into your text.  Here is a quote from wikipedia on the subject:

"Microsoft Windows CP1252 (sometimes incorrectly called ANSI or ISO-Latin) contains the typographic apostrophe at 0x92. Due to "smart quotes" in Microsoft software converting the ASCII apostrophe to this value, other software makers have been forced to adopt this as a de facto convention. For instance the HTML 5 standard specifies that this value is interpreted as CP1252. Some earlier non-Microsoft browsers would display a '?' for this and make web pages composed with Microsoft software somewhat hard to read."

It turns out that we initially entered the names for this data in Microsoft Word, where the silent search and replace of our apostrophe's conspired with Rosie O'Donnell against me. 

Be careful out there intrepid geeks - not all apostrophe's are created equal.

Todd

Beginners Guide to Copenhagen Train System

I attended VMworld Europe last week, in Copenhagen, Denmark and had a great time.  Part of this was using the excellent system of trains to get around.  In the process I learned a few key insights that I wanted to share for others that might be using the trains in Copenhagen for the first time.  If others reading this are more knowledgeable please add comments (or if you find errors let me know about that too).

There are actually three different types of trains that operate in Copenhagen.  If you get a city pass, you can ride any of them while remaining in the Copenhagen area.  The three train types are the Metro, S-Train, and Regional Trains.  The Metro is run by a different company than the S-Train and regional trains, and hence they have separate websites.

The Metro currently has two lines - M1 and M2 - which both share Vanlose as the end of the line to the west, but diverge at the Christianshaven stop to end at Vestamager for M1 and Lufthavnen for M2.

The S-Train (or S-Tog in Danish) is the other commuter train system in Copenhagen.  It has what appears to be at least seven different lines, that are color coded.  There is a big "S" sign that marks which platforms are for the S-Train.

The regional trains go to areas beyond Copenhagen and is what you take to go over into Sweden or up to Helsingor for example.  This is also what I rode from the Airport to the Kobenhaven H station, and later from Kobenhaven H to Malmo C station in Sweden.

This map is the best one I found. It shows all three trains and stations.  It's from a travel blog site.  I think that it is the best because the Metro is run by a different company than the S-Tog and regional trains.  So it took an independent 3rd party to put everything together.

You can transfer between the different train types, you just need to make sure you have the proper ticket.  They do check people for tickets and they do hand out fines to people that do not have a ticket - I saw this happen twice in the week I was in Copenhagen.

There were always very helpful people in the ticket offices and on the platforms, at the big stations, that were happy to help me understand which platform and which train to take.  It was also very nice that they all spoke English.  If you aren't sure what you are doing - just ask somebody.

Todd

Taking a Different Look at Performance for vSphere Storage Appliance

I've been working with and doing performance testing with the new vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) for most of this year.  The white paper was published last week and I encourage you to read it if you are interested in getting a deeper understanding of VSA.

I've also done a lot of performance work with Oracle RAC, SAP, and SQL Server this year, and there is a big difference between that and VSA testing.

When testing with big databases and the applications that go along with them, the storage requirements to achieve the needed performance levels are usually pretty high.  I've used big EMC, NetApp, HP Lefthand, and Dell Equallogic storage to support thousands of IOPs while maintaining low latency.  In these tests we are analyzing the storage usage in each test to ensure that we get the performance that we need. These big storage systems are necessary to meet the requirements of the applications being tested.

VSA is designed to be a simple to install, simple to use, and simple to manage storage solution for small environments.  It can be the first "SAN" for environments where it was not possible to have a SAN before.  It is not designed to support or be used with the types of workloads at the stress levels that I normally test with.  So approaching a performance study of VSA required something different.

Instead of trying to push as many IOPS as possible or getting as many users as possible, I focused on providing some insights into the key factors of VSA performance.  This includes a couple of test scenarios designed to show two different things.

The first used the VMmark2 workload to show that enterprise apps can run with good performance on VSA.  Specifically, it showed that Exchange, a webstore front and backend, and a Java based interactive website could all run very well, at the same time, while supporting the workload equivalent of over 1000 users.

The second test used IOBlazer (a cool and easy to use IO generator tool) to show how the VSA's Network RAID (or replication) traffic impacts the performance across the cluster as load is spread across the VSA cluster. This test illustrates how as you put load one datastore the network RAID that is ensuring the data is always available causes some load to also occur on a secondary node in the VSA cluster.  The graphs are cool in this section.

I think that most customers will probably not need the additional performance information that I have included with these scenarios because of how easy VSA is to use and manage, but it will help those that are interested in getting a more advanced understanding or want to get into a more detailed level of performance monitoring.  Most will not have need for this additional detail, but many geeks like me will be interested anyway.

So this approach is a bit different from the usual type of performance work that you see.  This isn't the million IOPS test or an Oracle RAC performance study.  It's meant for a different environment.  One that is getting it's first taste of shared storage and cool things like vMotion, DRS, and HA.

Todd

VMware Was Everywhere and Nowhere At Oracle Open World 2011

There was a running joke with everybody that came by the VMware booth at Oracle Open World this year.

"Wow, Oracle really doesn't like you guys!""What did you do to get back here?"  "Are they trying to hide you?" "You guys have been literally put in the corner!"

The VMware booth was literally in the back corner of the expo floor at OOW 2011.  Some of this was our fault for deciding to go with a smaller booth this year, but I think some of it may have to do with something else.

There were still lots of customers that came by and we had tons of discussion around running Oracle products on vSphere.  This year it seemed like there were more customers who were already running some or all of their Oracle databases on vSphere which was great.  I also spent some time explaining the concepts of virtualization and specifics about vSphere to customers who were new to the ideas which was also great.

From what I heard, talking to various speakers at OOW that I know, Oracle requested that all references to VMware be removed from their presentations and replaced with generic references.  But the speakers would go ahead and say "VMware" during the talk.

The final VMware highlight for me came during Larry Ellison's keynote on Wednesday afternoon.  He announced the new Oracle Cloud and gave a lengthy demo.  While announcing the Oracle Cloud he spent a fair amount of time describing why it was good.  You could take most of the statements that he made about the Oracle Cloud and put them directly into a keynote from VMware's Paul Maritz.  The Oracle vision for cloud and the VMware vision for cloud were similar in many ways.  Larry even used Paul's line about the Hotel California for proprietary clouds - VMs can check in, but they can never leave.  Larry, of course, never directly referenced VMware in his keynote, but the similar hybrid cloud strategy was definite.

So while Oracle preferred that VMware not be mentioned or seen at OOW, in reality VMware was everywhere.

Todd

No More Talk About Old Stuff at Oracle Open World

Oracle Open World 2011 starts next week, and I'll be there again this year (I think this will be the 7th one for me).  I've done lots of testing with Oracle  RAC on vSphere 5 over the last year and look forward to getting the chance to discuss it with customers, partners, and general database geeks.

One thing that has changed since OOW last year is that Oracle changed their support stance and RAC has been supported on vSphere since last November.  We still get some questions about support for Oracle on vSphere, but not nearly as many as last year.  If you want to discuss it or get your questions answered you can come by and talk to us at the VMware booth or you check the website.

An even bigger thing that is different is that VMware has begun to enter the database world.  With the announcement vFabric Data Director we now have the capability to add database as a service to your vSphere environment.  This changes and challenges many of the traditional notions about how to provision, manage, and use databases.  I think this is an incredibly interesting new development that is an example of how things are going to be changing in the future.

I think it's going to be a fun year at OOW with lots of the discussion revolving around virtualization and cloud  and hopefully less talk about support and licensing.

Todd

Five Things You Might Not Know About ESXTOP

I use ESXTOP almost daily in my job to do analysis of performance on ESX / vSphere.  In working with partners and customers I often hear them say that they didn't know ESXTOP could do that.  Here is list of five most popular:

1.  What is this "ESXTOP" that you speak of?  Many have just not heard of ESXTOP and either have not been concerned with performance previously or only used the information from the viClient's performance graphs.  To directly answer the question, ESXTOP or rESXTOP is a character based utility that runs on the ESX or ESXi host that can be used to monitor, display, and log virtually all the performance information of the ESX host.  You can simply enable the ability to ssh into the host from the troubleshooting options on the ESX host local console, and then ssh into the system and run "esxtop" to get started.  You can also use "resxtop" to run it remotely against an ESX host. Either way, ESXTOP is a tool often used at VMware to diagnose and identify performance problems.

2. There's more to see than just CPU data.  The initial screen for esxtop is very similiar to top from linux showing CPU usage information.  This is only a small part of what can be seen with esxtop.  By prssing different keys, different sets of data are displayed.  The "d" key will open the disk screen, "m" will show memory related information, "n" will show the virtual networking stats, "v" will show the virtual disks. To get a complete list of available screens just press "?" or "h".  You can also add more fields or columns of data by pressing the "f" key and then selecting the additional fields that you want to be displayed.

3. You can capture ESXTOP data in batch mode.  It seems that most people run esxtop top in it's interactive mode, where it displays all of it's great performance info in real time.  This is a fun way to run ESXTOP and and can give valuable insights in real time.  But it can be even more useful to be able to capture all of this data and be able to analyze it at a more detailed level later AND use it to create cool graphs.  By starting esxtop with the -b option and redirecting the output to a text file with a pipe, ESXTOP will create a CSV file with all of the performance data.

4. View ESXTOP data with windows perfmon and impress your friends and co-workers.  The CSV file that is output by ESXTOP can be imported into Windows perfmon.exe (Windows Performance Monitor).  This provides a good graphical interface to be able to quickly select counters and view them.  In order to import the file into perfmon, you will first need to copy it onto the windows system where you will be running perfmon.  You can use winscp or other utility of your choice to get it copied off the ESX host.  Start perfmon and then right click in the middle of the graph area and select Properties.  Then select the Source tab and click on the Add button.  Browse to the saved .CSV file and open it.  You will now to be able to add counters in perfmon that are from the data for your ESX host.

5. Carve out a small set of data from an ESXTOP data file with esxplot to make your job easier.  The CSV files that esxtop produces can be massively wide with thousands of columns.  Too wide for even the latest versions of Excel in many cases.  This can make it difficult to quickly pull out a specific performance counter to put into your spreadsheet for analysis or cool graph creation.  The easiest solution I know is to use the VMware labs fling esxplot to export a subset of the data.  You simply import the .CSV file from ESXTOP into esxplot, select and view data for counters in esxplot, and then when you ready export the data.  The result is a much smaller .CSV file that just has the columns of data that you want.

So now you are armed with lots of ESXTOP tips and tricks that will make it easier for you to analyze and view performance of ESX and it's VMs.   

Todd