VMware Cloud on AWS Host General Considerations

This section provides guidance regarding a number of general performance considerations in VMware Cloud on AWS hosts.

• Plan your deployment by allocating enough resources for all the virtual machines you will run, as well as those needed by VMware Cloud on AWS itself.

• Allocate to each virtual machine only as much virtual hardware as that virtual machine requires. Provisioning a virtual machine with more resources than it requires can, in some cases, reduce the performance of that virtual machine as well as other virtual machines sharing the same host.

• Unused or unnecessary virtual hardware devices can impact performance and should be deactivated.

  For example, Windows guest operating systems poll optical drives (that is, CD or DVD drives) quite frequently. When virtual machines are configured to use a physical drive, and multiple guest operating systems simultaneously try to access that drive, performance could be impacted. This impact can be reduced by configuring the virtual machines to use ISO images instead of physical drives, and can be avoided entirely by deactivating optical drives in virtual machines when the devices are not needed.

• VMware Cloud on AWS supports multiple virtual hardware versions. If you plan to move a virtual machine from VMware Cloud on AWS to an on-premises ESXi host (in a hybrid cloud scenario, for example), make sure the machine’s virtual hardware version is supported by the ESXi hosts on which you intend to use them. You can see what’s supported by each version of ESXi in VMware KB article 2007240.