VMworld Session Review – VAPP2305

Session: Extreme Performance Series – Understanding Applications that Require Extra TLC

Speakers: Vishnu Mohan (VMware), Reza Taheri (VMware).



This session was one of a series covering Extreme Performance.

If you are a virtualization Engineer then this should be a session you catch-up with and I am an engineer to my core. Of the three VMworld’s I have attended this was by far the most enjoyable and interesting session I have attended.

This session really looks at edge cases where virtualizationtechnologies would be the cause of performance issue.

Things like standards are not really discussed but assumed, in so much as this talk doesn’t cover rookie mistakes and assumes for all scenarios that all best practices are currently being met and the latest VMware stack is being used.

Extreme I/O, latency and timers are covered, dissected and demystified. Both Vishnu and Reza were brutally honest and completely unapologetic about the limitations of virtualization. The issues that were encountered affecting virtualization, would affect all platforms and not just VMware’s.

The speakers do make it very clear that for 99% of workloads/applications the default settings will serve you just fine and they are completly right. When was the last time you needed to “tune” a VM, not the application but the VM? 

Also questions are posed along the lines of “You want to use SR-IOV? What for?” A VM can push 1 million packets. Perhaps if you needed extremely low latency and virtualization together. But maybe you would be better off going physical in that case.

For me the big takeaway from this session is know your workloads. Question and analyse.