The Xeon E5-2600: Dual Sandy Bridge for Servers
by Johan De Gelas on March 6, 2012 9:27 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Virtualization
- Xeon
- Opteron
- Cloud Computing
Virtualization Performance: Linux VMs on ESXi
We introduced our new vApus FOS (For Open Source) server workloads in our review of the Facebook "Open Compute" servers. In a nutshell, it a mix of four VMs with open source workloads: two PhpBB websites (Apache2, MySQL), one OLAP MySQL "Community server 5.1.37" database, and one VM with VMware's open source groupware Zimbra 7.1.0. Zimbra is quite a complex application as it contains the following components:
- Jetty, the web application server
- Postfix, an open source mail transfer agent
- OpenLDAP software, user authentication
- MySQL is the database
- Lucene full-featured text and search engine
- ClamAV, an anti-virus scanner
- SpamAssassin, a mail filter
- James/Sieve filtering (mail)
All VMs are based on a minimal CentOS 6 setup with VMware Tools installed. All our current virtualization testing is on top of the hypervisor which we know best: ESXi (5.0). We have changed two things in our vApusMark FOS setup: we upgradeded the guestOS from 5.6 to 6.0 and increased the number of vCPUs of the OLAP VM from 2 to 4. This small upgrade means that our latest results should not be compared to the results in our older articles.
We (Tijl Deneut and myself) tested with four tiles (one tile = four VMs). Each tile needs nine vCPUs, so the test requires 36 vCPUs.
The benchmark above measures throughput. As for response times, let's take a look at the table below, which gives you the average response time per VM:
| vApus FOS Average Response Times (ms), lower is better! | ||||||||
| CPU | PhpBB1 | PHPBB2 | MySQL OLAP | Zimbra | ||||
| AMD Opteron 6276 2.3 | 671 | 514 | 1410 | 758 | ||||
| AMD Opteron 6174 2.2 | 674 | 524 | 1210 | 861 | ||||
| Intel Xeon E5-2660 2.2 | 645 | 394 | 160 | 631 | ||||
| Intel Xeon E5-2690 2.9 | 362 | 288 | 40 | 483 | ||||
| Intel Xeon X5650 2.66 | 745 | 569 | 821 | 866 | ||||
Considering that we may assume that the Xeon E5-2690 consumes considerably more than the E5-2660, it looks like the Xeon E5-2660 is the new virtualization champ. Let us check out the power consumption numbers under a realistic load.
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silverblue - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
You've put that Interlagos has 4x2MB L2, but that would only be true for Valencia; Interlagos is 8x2MB.aranyagag - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
you forgot the E5-2687W with a 150w tdp and higher speedscolonelclaw - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
Hi There,Thanks for an excellent article. With regards to the rendering benchmarks, would you consider using VRay as a rendering engine? It's fast becoming industry standard, is compatible with all the big hitters (Max, Maya, Softimage etc), is cross platform, and I believe, is incredibly well coded to scale with cores.
It's also incredibly popular, not something you could say about iRay right now.
Slik - Saturday, March 10, 2012 - link
Would be nice if some game benchmark was included as well.colonelclaw - Wednesday, March 14, 2012 - link
Bloody hell those chips look good, and don't Intel know it; those prices make me wince.Having waited what seems like forever, I was thrilled to see the Xeon E5s finally available, right up until I did some quick maths and figured out that for my business to buy a new 2U Twin squared rendernode with 16/32 cores per node will cost us around £10,000. Still the thing is, now that those chips are available, next time we buy kit we can't afford not to choose them.
Skouperd - Tuesday, March 20, 2012 - link
Great article... but can it run crysis?Seriously, what will happen if you plug in some high end graphics card in that machine, how will that compare from a gaming perspeective to say an LGA2011 cpu?
;-)
fudd101 - Wednesday, April 4, 2012 - link
From the 'article' .....'The Opteron might also have a role in the low end, price sensitive HPC market, where it still performs very well. It won't have much of chance in the high end clustered one as Intel has the faster and more power efficient PCIe interface'
Well, if that's the case, why exactly would AMD be scoring so many design wins with Interlagos. Including this one ...
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2394515,00.as...
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/Cray-Ti...
U think those guys at Cray were going for low performance ? In fact, seems like AMD has being rather cleaning up in the HPC market since the arrival of Interlagos. And the markets have picked up on it, AMD stock is thru the roof since the start of the year. Or just see how many Intel processors occupy the the top 10 supercomputers on the planet. Nuff said ...
jaskhoo - Wednesday, July 11, 2012 - link
Hi, abit blur here and would like to know if there's anyone who could enlighten abit.I'm looking to purchase a new server to work with an SQL 2012 4 core, the initial ppreference was for an E5620 which is now an outdated model but I can't go for higher E5-xxx models as all are 6 core and will affect the 4 core SQL licensing. I'm not running a huge databse but would like to know if there are any serious performance difference between the two processor. Appreciate it.
famalosa - Tuesday, April 26, 2016 - link
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