Home > Workload Solutions > Oracle > Best Practices > Intel-Based Oracle Best Practices on Dell PowerEdge R740 and PowerMax 2000 > Storage Best Practices > Day Three Best Practices > VMware vSphere: Virtual Machine Latency Sensitivity
Many database workloads are sensitive to storage performance. In this best practice, the virtual machine latency sensitivity has been changed to optimize performance.
Category | PowerMax Storage |
Product | VMware vSphere Virtual Machines |
Type of best practice | Performance Optimization |
Day and value | Day 3, Fine-tuning |
Overview
VMware vSphere provides the ability to adjust latency sensitivity to optimize low latency database workloads and similar applications. We used the default value for latency sensitivity (Normal) for our baseline test. This setting optimized ESXi to deliver high throughput.
This best practice recommends changing the latency sensitivity to HIGH. Changing the latency sensitivity to HIGH causes ESXi to optimize I/O operations for the virtual machine. This latency sensitivity change was completed for all the virtual databases.
Recommendation
Changing the latency sensitivity to HIGH showed minor improvements for:
• New Orders per Minute (NOPM)
• Transactions per Minute (TPM)
• PowerMax IOPS
• Log File Parallel Write
Server CPU utilization and database File Sequential Write saw no improvement.
We recommend virtual machine latency sensitivity as a Day 3, Fine-tuning activity. Consider changing the latency sensitivity to High for the virtual machine to optimize storage performance.
Implementation Steps
Requirements: ESXi 6.7 requires full CPU reservation to power on a VM with hardware version 14 when latency sensitivity is set to HIGH. For more information, see Adjust Latency Sensitivity.
References