One of the world’s largest construction materials companies relies heavily on a dispatch and workflow application to schedule and deliver cement directly to any job site – at the exact time requested. One director put it succinctly when he said “if the cement doesn’t get delivered, we don’t get paid.”
During a new VMware deployment, the dispatch application experienced performance slow-downs. There was concern because a previous P2V application conversion had no issues. Transactions on the “converted” applications were performing as expected, while transaction requests on the newly deployed virtual servers took twice as long.
The problem had been ongoing for several weeks – and had evolved to the point that the company was reconsidering virtualization of the application environment. BlueStripe was called in to see if the cause of the performance differences could be isolated.
The critical need was to get an accurate view of the complete application system, the components that made up each individual instance, and the transaction performance across the components (whether in the physical infrastructure, converted infrastructure, or newly deployed virtual infrastructure).
Upon installation, FactFinder automatically identified all instances of the application, correctly noting the environment in which each application instance resided. FactFinder also analyzed each instance of the application automatically to find any potential bottlenecks.
FactFinder immediately verified that the two environments did indeed perform differently. Further examination confirmed that virtualization configuration and performance data was identical across all VMs, and that the ESX Servers were performing appropriately.
FactFinder identified the Microsoft SMB Protocol as a potential bottleneck, but only in the newly deployed infrastructure, indicating that newly deployed servers took twice as long to execute these SMB requests than the converted servers. Armed with this critical insight, the company’s Windows administrators were able to standardize the Windows configuration and cache settings across both environments.
The company eliminated their application performance issues and gained confidence in their decision to deploy new applications in virtual environments.