Performance bottlenecks are the bane of admins. They negatively impact an application’s quality of service, and can lead to nights and weekends filled with troubleshooting and remediation.
Add in a layer of virtualization and the bottlenecks usually bleed over into misconfigurations, such as co-stop issues in vSMP VMs when one vCPU is sufficient, or over-allocation of memory when fewer resources would have sufficed.
One of the top independent virtualization bloggers, Vladan Seget (@vladan), writes:
Every admin I meet puts performance on the first… place of his priorities. The other priority is disaster recovery. Depending [on] the environments, admins usually prefer to deliver [the] best performance, but [have concerns] about fast backups (and recovery) too.
To address these challenges, Vladan recommends becoming more knowledgeable about virtualization, and using the right tools:
Some of the tools integrate a possibility to detect configuration changes in the virtual environment. It means that you can see what changed the day that the performance started to be bad.
Read more about what Valdan says here and then join the conversation to read the great comment thread, which includes many hidden gems, such as why the right tools are essential to managing virtual environments and configuration issues, and which tools others have found most useful.