In VMWorld @ San Francisco I was able to attend the advanced performance tuning session for vCenter Server, but that was primarily focussed towards the Windows deployment only. With growing implementation of the vCenter Server Appliance, here are some tips on ensuring that the appliance runs nice and fast.
By default the appliance deploys wiht 8GB of RAM which can be changed but what you really need to alter are the JVM heap sizes to allow for better performance. If you are a dev then you will know that there needs to be a proper balance of how much these sizes need to be increased because the bigger the size the longer it will take to do garbage collection task which can then add to performance latency. My point here being do not increase it if you don’t have performance issues and when you do increase it, use smaller increments.
Alternatively for smaller environments you can reduce the memory footprint to infact gain some performance improvements however these would be minor. The below process can be used to increase the heap sizes as well.
Below are the steps to reduce the heap sizes –
1. ssh to your vcsa server
2. login with the root account
3. execute command: vpxd-servicecfg jvm-max-heap read
The output gives you three values:
VC_MAX_HEAP_SIZE_QS
== Indicates the amount of RAM configured for the Query Service (inventory service)
VC_MAX_HEAP_SIZE_SPS
== Indicates the amount of RAM configured for the Policy Based Storage Management (storage profile service)
VC_MAX_HEAP_SIZE_TOMCAT
==> Indicates the amount of RAM configured for Tomcat (vSphere Web Client Service)
VC_CFG_RESULT = 0
==> Indicates that the vpxd-servicecfg command was successful
4. Reconfigure memory for Tomcat (vSphere Web Client Service)
Edit usr/lib/vmware-vsphere-client/server/wrapper/conf/wrapper.conf
Change the value for wrapper.java.maxmemory to 1024 (default = 2048)
5. Reconfigure memory for the Query Service (Inventory Service)
Edit /usr/lib/vmware-vpx/inventoryservice/wrapper/conf/wrapper.conf
Change the value for wrapper.java.maxmemory to 1536 (default = 3072)
6. Reconfigure memory for the Policy Based Storage Management (Storage Profile Service)
Edit /usr/lib/vmware-vpx/sps/wrapper/conf/wrapper.conf
Change the value for wrapper.java.maxmemory to 512 (default =1024)
7. Shut down the vCenter Server Appliance
8. Reconfigure the VM to 4 GB RAM
9. Reboot the Virtual machine
Hope this helps!
Follow Us!