Improving Performance in Virtualization Manager Version 4.0

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.
Use of Custom Collections
To further reduce the scope of systems displayed in Virtualization Manager and improve
performance, you can create custom collections in HP SIM. For detailed information about how to
create a custom collection, see the next section. For best performance improvement, create collections
that display fewer than 500 nodes.
Even a small collection can easily fan out to display a very large number of nodes. For example,
consider a collection consisting of a single server blade that is also a VM host). If this collection
defaults to being viewed in the Blades perspective, the collection can fan out to discover the
enclosure, the VC Domain, and the VC Domain Group. If there is a VC Domain Group, all VC
Domains in the Group are discovered, along with all enclosures in all VC Domains. Subsequently, all
server blades in all enclosures and all virtual machines in all server blades also are discovered.
Because of this fan-out effect, consider the following when you create collections:
• Send the collection to the correct perspective. In the preceding example, if the perspective
were set to the Virtual Machines perspective, only the server blade and its virtual machines
would have been displayed.
• Consider using the VSE (collection nodes only) default view. This selects the Physical
and Virtual perspective in Virtualization Manager but shows only the nodes in the collection
without any fan-out. From this point, you can navigate to any other perspective and maintain
the no-fan-out criteria.
Consider creating a Custom Collections folder under the All VSE Resources collection to hold all of
the custom collections you create. To do this, and to create collections within this folder, you must be
logged in as an administrator.
The following are ways you can create custom collections:
• A single enclosure: If you want to view only an enclosure and its contents, the best
method is to create a collection by specifying the contents explicitly instead of using attributes
(to avoid the problems noted earlier). Then select the VSE (collection nodes only) default
view so that fan-out does not occur. Alternatively, if no VC Domain or VC Domain Group is
associated with the enclosure, you can choose the VSE (Blades) default view.
• A set of systems making up a solution: If, for example, you want to view a database
server, application server, and web host as a set of systems that implement an application,
identify the members of the collection individually with the default view set to VSE
(collection nodes only).
• A single ESX host: Again, to display just one host and its virtual machines, create a
collection, specify the ESX host individually, and set the default view to VSE (Virtual
Machines).