Hyperion Financial Management (HFM) Consolidation Performance on VMWare (Doc ID 2376821.1)

Last updated on SEPTEMBER 10, 2024

Applies to:

Symptoms

Using VMWare virtualization, significant consolidation performance difference found between 2 environments, Production and QA, running same version of HFM against identical HFM application.

Changes

VMWare vSphere 5.5 introduced a new feature to allow administrators to control CPU Latency. Technical brief Deploying Extremely Latency-Sensitive Applications in VMware vSphere 5.5

Specific details are as follows:

Latency-Sensitivity Feature

The Latency-Sensitivity feature aims at eliminating the aforementioned major sources of extra latency imposed by virtualization to achieve low response time and jitter.  Briefly, this per-VM feature achieves the goal by 1) giving exclusive access to physical resources to avoid resource contention due to sharing, 2) bypassing virtualization layers to eliminate the overhead of extra processing, and 3) tuning virtualization layers to reduce the overhead. Performance can be further improved when the latency-sensitivity feature is used together with a pass-through mechanism such as single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV). 

Enabling the Latency-Sensitivity Feature

To enable the latency-sensitivity feature, the virtual machine’s Latency Sensitivity should be set to be High. The High setting is designed for extremely latency-sensitive applications and all the functionalities and tunings that this feature provides are applied. The Normal setting does not engage the latency-sensitivity feature. The Medium and Low settings are experimental for vSphere 5.5 and hence are not covered in this technical brief. Throughout this paper, when the latency-sensitivity feature is mentioned, it refers to the High setting unless specified otherwise.

Cause

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