18.08.2013 Views

vSphere Installation and Setup - Documentation - VMware

vSphere Installation and Setup - Documentation - VMware

vSphere Installation and Setup - Documentation - VMware

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

Create successful ePaper yourself

Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.

<strong>vSphere</strong> <strong>Installation</strong> <strong>and</strong> <strong>Setup</strong><br />

Table 2-1. Recommendations for Enhanced Performance<br />

System Element Recommendation<br />

RAM ESXi hosts require more RAM than typical servers. Provide<br />

at least 8GB of RAM to take full advantage of ESXi features<br />

<strong>and</strong> run virtual machines in typical production<br />

environments. An ESXi host must have sufficient RAM to<br />

run concurrent virtual machines. The following examples are<br />

provided to help you calculate the RAM required by the<br />

virtual machines running on the ESXi host.<br />

Operating four virtual machines with<br />

Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Windows XP requires at least<br />

3GB of RAM for baseline performance. This figure includes<br />

approximately 1024MB for the virtual machines, 256MB<br />

minimum for each operating system as recommended by<br />

vendors.<br />

Running these four virtual machines with 512MB RAM<br />

requires that the ESXi host have approximately 4GB RAM,<br />

which includes 2048MB for the virtual machines.<br />

These calculations do not take into account possible memory<br />

savings from using variable overhead memory for each<br />

virtual machine. See <strong>vSphere</strong> Resource Management .<br />

Dedicated Fast Ethernet adapters for virtual machines Place the management network <strong>and</strong> virtual machine<br />

networks on different physical network cards. Dedicated<br />

Gigabit Ethernet cards for virtual machines, such as Intel<br />

PRO 1000 adapters, improve throughput to virtual machines<br />

with high network traffic.<br />

Disk location Place all data that your virtual machines use on physical<br />

disks allocated specifically to virtual machines. Performance<br />

is better when you do not place your virtual machines on the<br />

disk containing the ESXi boot image. Use physical disks that<br />

are large enough to hold disk images that all the virtual<br />

machines use.<br />

VMFS5 partitioning The ESXi installer creates the initial VMFS volumes on the<br />

first blank local disk found. To add disks or modify the<br />

original configuration, use the <strong>vSphere</strong> Client. This practice<br />

ensures that the starting sectors of partitions are 64K-aligned,<br />

which improves storage performance.<br />

NOTE For SAS-only environments, the installer might not<br />

format the disks. For some SAS disks, it is not possible to<br />

identify whether the disks are local or remote. After the<br />

installation, you can use the <strong>vSphere</strong> Client to set up VMFS.<br />

Processors Faster processors improve ESXi performance. For certain<br />

workloads, larger caches improve ESXi performance.<br />

Hardware compatibility Use devices in your server that are supported by ESXi 5.1<br />

drivers. See the Hardware Compatibility Guide at<br />

http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility.<br />

ESXi Support for 64-Bit Guest Operating Systems<br />

ESXi offers support for several 64-bit guest operating systems.<br />

For a complete list of operating systems supported for ESXi, see the <strong>VMware</strong> Compatibiity Guide at<br />

http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php.<br />

Hosts running virtual machines with 64-bit guest operating systems have the following hardware<br />

requirements:<br />

n For AMD Opteron-based systems, the processors must be Opteron Rev E or later.<br />

30 <strong>VMware</strong>, Inc.

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!