Customizing the Delphix Continuous Data engine system settings

Overview

Before you deploy Delphix, it's often necessary to adjust your virtual machine (VM) memory, CPU, disk, and network settings to match your specific performance and scalability requirements. You change these settings in your VMware infrastructure, not within the Delphix engine.

All steps described on this page must be performed using your VMware management console, such as vCenter or vSphere Client, or an equivalent interface for managing VM settings. These settings apply at the VM level and are external to the Delphix Continuous Data engine software.

Delphix provides an OVA installation file with minimum system requirements. However, depending on your deployment, you may need to increase resource allocations, like memory size, number of CPUs, storage disks, and network configuration. These settings ensure optimal engine performance, especially in environments managing a high number of objects or data-intensive workflows.

Procedure

  1. Shut down the guest operating system and power off the Delphix Continuous Data engine.

  2. From Getting Started, select Edit Virtual Machine Settings.

  3. You can now customize your system settings:

Setting

Options

Memory Size

Set to 64GB or larger based on sizing analysis. In the Resource Allocation panel, ensure that Reserve all guest memory is checked. To adjust the resource allocation of a VM without rebooting it, Delphix supports "hot-plugging" CPUs and memory to ZFS (only available on ESX). Refer to Enabling hot-adding below for more information.

Number of CPUs

Allocate 8 vCPUs or more based on Delphix licensing. vCPUs should be fully reserved to ensure the Delphix engine does not compete for CPU cycles on an overcommitted host.

Supported Controllers

Delphix supports Paravirtual SCSI (PVSCSI) controllers or LSI Parallel controllers. Mixing different types of SCSI controllers is not supported within the engine.

We recommend you use PVSCSI controllers by default. Although PVSCSI supports high throughput with minimal processing cost, performance improvements on the Delphix engine may vary.

Disks for Data Storage

Add virtual disks to provide storage for user data such as dSources and VDBs. The underlying storage must be redundant. Add a minimum of 150GB per storage disk. All virtual disks should be the same size and have the same performance characteristics. On VMFS, use thick provisioned, lazy zeroed disks. To alleviate IO bottlenecks at the virtual controller layer, spread the virtual disks across all four virtual SCSI controllers.

Data Storage Multipathing Policy

For EMC storage, you should always set the multipathing policy to round-robin (default for 5.x). Additionally, change the IO Operation Limit from the default of 1000 to 1. You should also strongly consider this for other storage platforms.

Read the VMware KB article EMC VMAX and DMX symmetrix storage array recommendations for optimal performance on VMware ESXi/ESX for more information.

Network

The network configuration is set to have a VMXNET3 network adapter. VMXNET3 is a tuned network interface included with the VMtools provided in the OVA file. It is assigned to VM Network.

JUMBO Frames
VMXNET3 supports Ethernet jumbo frames you can use to maximize throughput and minimize CPU utilization.

Adding Link Aggregation via VMware NIC Teaming 
To increase throughput or for failover, add multiple physical NICs to the vSwitch connected to the Delphix Engine. To increase throughput, NIC Teaming must use the Route Based on IP Hash protocol for load balancing.

Dedicate Physical NICs to the Delphix Engine
For best performance, assign the Delphix engine to network adapters used exclusively by Delphix.
The Delphix Continuous Data engine supports a maximum of 750 objects. However, managing a higher number of objects may require increased memory and CPU resources. Therefore, you must upgrade system specifications based on usage to ensure optimal performance.

Enabling hot-adding

To manually enable hot-adding in the vCenter console:

  1. Log in to the Delphix Continuous Data engine.

  2. Right-click on the engine and select Edit settings.

  3. Edit settings:

    1. To enable CPU hot-add, go to the CPU section and select the CPU Hot Plug checkbox.

    2. To enable memory hot-add, go to the memory section and select the Memory Hot Plug checkbox.

  4. Modify the appropriate setting to the new value. Note that only expansion of CPU and memory is supported, and attempts to reduce the values available to the Delphix engine will fail.

  5. Click OK to confirm the changes.

Newly-added memory is not automatically reflected in system information APIs nor in the UI. To refresh this information, restart the management service.

If you are migrating from versions older than 6.0, an extra step is required to enable CPU/memory hot-plug:

  1. After migrating, turn off the VM.

  2. Open VM Settings.

  3. Select VM Options.

  4. Under General, update the guest OS to Ubuntu (64-bit).

  5. Under Advanced, select Edit Configuration.

  6. Set disk.EnableUUID to TRUE.

  7. Follow normal hot-plug enable steps.

If you're upgrading your existing engine from versions older than 6.0.6.0, you need to manually enable two vSphere properties after the upgrade from vSphere to use this feature. The properties are cputHotAddEnabled and memoryHotAddEnabled.

When you upgrade to 6.0 from 5.3, in addition to two properties above, you also need to update the guest OS and version in vSphere to Ubuntu. Without this, hot-adding memory may not be allowed from vSphere, even if memoryHotAddEnabled is enabled.

Post-requisites