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VMware vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive

The VMware vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive is a guide to building consistent high-performing ESXi hosts. A book that people can’t put down. Written for administrators, architects, consultants, aspiring VCDX-es and people eager to learn more about the elements that control the behavior of CPU, memory, storage and network resources.

This book shows that we can fundamentally and materially improve the systems we’re building. We can make the currently running ones consistently faster by deeply understanding and optimizing our systems.

The reality is that specifics of the infrastructure matter. Details matter. Especially for distributed platforms which abstract resource layers, such as NSX and vSAN. Knowing your systems inside and out is the only way to be sure you’ve properly handled those details. It’s about having a passion for these details. It’s about loving the systems we build. It’s about understanding them end-to-end.

This book explains the concepts and mechanisms behind the physical resource components and the VMkernel resource schedulers, which enables you to:

– Optimize your workload for current and future Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) systems.
– Discover how vSphere Balanced Power Management takes advantage of the CPU Turbo Boost functionality, and why High Performance does not.
– How the 3-DIMMs per Channel configuration results in a 10-20% performance drop.
– How TLB works and why it is bad to disable large pages in virtualized environments.
– Why 3D XPoint is perfect for the vSAN caching tier.
– What queues are and where they live inside the end-to-end storage data paths.
– Tune VMkernel components to optimize performance for VXLAN network traffic and NFV environments.
– Why Intel’s Data Plane Development Kit significantly boosts packet processing performance.

Combine this book with the vSphere 6.7 Clustering Deep Dive, and the vSAN 6.7 U1 Deep Dive, and you have an in-depth and comprehensive set of books that deliver the information you need to design and administer both vSphere and vSAN in the enterprise.

Often referred to in the virtual community as the vSphere Resource kit, the Host Resource Deep Dive zooms in on hardware resources such as CPU and Memory and covers how the vSphere 6.5 resource scheduler manages these. The vSAN Deep Dive discusses how to leverage local storage devices to create a shared storage platform and the Clustering Deep Dive builds on top of that and zooms in how a group of ESXi hosts work together and provide clustering services. Buy all three and become your organizations’ private cloud superhero!

Scott Forehand

Scott is an experienced professional and recognized leader specializing in the design and implementation of enterprise virtualization, enterprise storage, server infrastructures and operations. A self-starter able to work both independently and in a team-oriented environment, Scott has a proven ability to create and automate solutions to improve productivity, reliability and performance. Throughout his professional career, Scott has proven successes implementing technology and service improvement initiatives and has a demonstrated ability to think strategically about business, create technical definition around objectives in complex situations, develop solution strategies, motivate and mobilize resources, and deliver end-to-end technology solutions. Scott has achieved multiple industry recognized certifications in virtualization, networking, cloud, storage, converged infrastructure, hyperconverged infrastructure and other technologies, and is honored to be a VMware vExpert in 2018-2022, and vExpert EUC 2020-2022.