Improving Performance in Virtualization Manager Version 4.0 Obstacles to Scalability ........................................................................................................................ 2 Fan-out and Auto-collapse..................................................................................................................... 2 Use of Existing Subcollections................................................................................................................
Obstacles to Scalability Attempting to view large numbers of managed nodes in the Virtualization Manager tool can decrease performance because the following tasks are too time consuming: • • • • Central management server (CMS) collection of performance data and processing of events for the nodes being viewed CMS generation of the HTML that represents the managed nodes Transmission of the HTML over the network Rendering of a page by the client web browser A practical limit for a fast CMS and a fast browser
Auto-collapse is a performance feature that limits the amount of information that is initially displayed in any page view. Ideally, Virtualization Manager displays all systems that result from the fan-out of a collection, but this can decrease performance because of the resources required to discover, transmit, and render all the information.
Fortunately, the perspectives associated with the subqueries of All VSE Resources are designed to discover only the most useful parent nodes. Thus, selecting the VMs query defaults to the Virtual Machines perspective and discovers only the VM Host parents. Subqueries and collections are intended for the most common categories of managed nodes. Using these as entry points into Virtualization Manager improves performance relative to using the larger All VSE Resources collection.
How to Create a Custom Collection In the left pane of the HP SIM window, click Customize…. You can perform this action as either a normal user or as an administrator. If you choose normal user, the resulting collection appears under the Private heading and is visible only to that user. If you choose administrator, the resulting collection can be visible to all users. The following example collection is created as an administrator.
Administrators can add the collection to any existing collection, but normal users can add a collection only to their own private collections. To give all users access to this collection, move it directly into the Shared collection. Alternatively, you can create a new collection called Custom Collections under All VSE Resources and place all your custom collections there.
Because this is a collection of VM Hosts, you want to view this collection in Virtualization Manager’s VM perspective. To specify this perspective, select VSE (Virtual Machines) from the Default View list and click OK. Select from one of the following Virtualization Manager views available in the Default View dropdown list: • • • • • • VSE – Displays nodes (with fan-out) in the Physical and Virtual perspectives.
Now, to view the ESX hosts of interest to you, you can simply click the esxhost ESX Hosts collection clicking All VSE Resources or the VM Hosts query: Creating custom collections improves performance in several ways: • • • • • Virtualization Manager does less processing to create the display of the systems. The HTML transmitted across the network is smaller and therefore faster to transmit. The browser does less processing to render the page.
Then, to get the best performance, select Collapse top level compartments by default and click OK: For the new setting to take effect, re-enter Virtualization Manager via a collection in the HP SIM left pane. (Alternatively, to collapse all containers without re-entering Virtualization Manager, click the button on the toolbar). Now you can expand only the compartments whose contents you want to view.
Browser Render Time The amount of time a browser uses to render large numbers of managed nodes depends on the browser itself. A comparison of Microsoft® Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7, and Mozilla Firefox 2 revealed that render times for displaying large numbers of systems are significantly faster with Firefox than with Internet Explorer. © 2008 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice.
