Re: OT: Performance of VM

2018-02-10 Thread Robert Klemme
On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 5:22 PM, Andrew Kerber  wrote:
> Have them check the memory and CPU allocation of the hypervisor, make sure
> its not overallocated. Make sure the partitions for stroage are aligned (see
> here:
> https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/08/guest-os-partition-alignment.html)
> . Install tuned, and enable the throughput performance profile. Oracle has a
> problem with transparent hugepages, postgres may well have the same problem,
> so consider disabling transparent hugepages.  There is no reason why
> performance on a VM would be worse than performance on a physical server.

Not theoretically. But in practice if you have anything run in a VM
like in this case you do not know what else is working on that box.
Analyzing these issues can be really cumbersome and tricky. This is
why I am generally skeptical of running a resource intensive
application like a RDBMS in a VM. To get halfway predictable results
you want at least a minimum of resources (CPU, memory, IO bandwidth)
reserved for that VM.

Anecdote: we once had a customer run our application in a VM (which is
supported) and complain about slowness. Eventually we found out that
they over committed memory - not in sum for all VMs which is common,
but this single VM had been configured to have more memory than was
physically available in the machine.

Kind regards

robert

-- 
[guy, jim, charlie].each {|him| remember.him do |as, often| as.you_can
- without end}
http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/



Re: OT: Performance of VM

2018-02-10 Thread Andrew Kerber
I am consultant that specializes in virtualizing oracle enterprise level 
workloads.  I’m picking up Postgres as a secondary skill.  You are right if you 
don’t manage it properly, you can have problems running enterprise workloads on 
vm s. But it can be done with proper management. And the HA and DR advantages 
of virtual systems are huge. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Feb 10, 2018, at 5:20 AM, Robert Klemme  wrote:
> 
>> On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 5:22 PM, Andrew Kerber  
>> wrote:
>> Have them check the memory and CPU allocation of the hypervisor, make sure
>> its not overallocated. Make sure the partitions for stroage are aligned (see
>> here:
>> https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2011/08/guest-os-partition-alignment.html)
>> . Install tuned, and enable the throughput performance profile. Oracle has a
>> problem with transparent hugepages, postgres may well have the same problem,
>> so consider disabling transparent hugepages.  There is no reason why
>> performance on a VM would be worse than performance on a physical server.
> 
> Not theoretically. But in practice if you have anything run in a VM
> like in this case you do not know what else is working on that box.
> Analyzing these issues can be really cumbersome and tricky. This is
> why I am generally skeptical of running a resource intensive
> application like a RDBMS in a VM. To get halfway predictable results
> you want at least a minimum of resources (CPU, memory, IO bandwidth)
> reserved for that VM.
> 
> Anecdote: we once had a customer run our application in a VM (which is
> supported) and complain about slowness. Eventually we found out that
> they over committed memory - not in sum for all VMs which is common,
> but this single VM had been configured to have more memory than was
> physically available in the machine.
> 
> Kind regards
> 
> robert
> 
> -- 
> [guy, jim, charlie].each {|him| remember.him do |as, often| as.you_can
> - without end}
> http://blog.rubybestpractices.com/