Quad Xeon 7500, the Best Virtualized Datacenter Building Block?
by Johan De Gelas on August 10, 2010 5:10 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
vApus Mark II
vApus Mark II uses the same applications as vApus Mark I, but they have been updated to newer versions. vApus Mark I uses five VMs with three server applications:
- One VM with the Nieuws.be OLAP database, based on SQL Server 2008 x64 running on Windows 2008 64-bit R2, stress tested by our in-house developed vApus test.
- Three MCS eFMS portals running PHP, IIS on Windows 2003 R2, stress tested by our in house developed vApus test.
- One OLTP database, based on the Swing bench 2.2 “Calling Circle benchmark” of Dominic Giles. We updated the Oracle database to version 11G R2 running on Windows 2008 R2.
All VMs are tested with several sequential user concurrencies. All VMs are “warmed up” with lower user counts. We measure only at the higher concurrencies, later in the test. At that point, results are repetitive as the databases are using their caches and buffers optimally.
The OLAP VM is based on the Microsoft SQL Server database of the Dutch Nieuws.be site, one of the newest web 2.0 websites launched in 2008. We updated to SQL Server 2008 R2. This VM gets now eight virtual CPUs (vCPUs), a feature that is supported by the newest hypervisors such as VMware ESX 4.0 and Xen 4.0. This kind of high vCPU count is one of the conditions that needs to be met before administrators will virtualize these kind of “heavy duty” applications. The application hardly touches the disk, as the vast majority of activity is in memory during the test cycle. About 135GB of disk space is necessary, but the most used data is cached in about 4GB of RAM.
The MCS eFMS portal, a real-world facility management web application, has been discussed in detail here. It is a complex IIS, PHP, and FastCGI site running on top of Windows 2003 R2 32-bit. Note that these two VMs run in a 32-bit guest OS, which impacts the VM monitor mode. We left this application running on Windows 2003, as virtualization allows you to minimize costs by avoiding unnecessary upgrades. We use three MCS VMs, as web servers are more numerous than database servers in most setups. Each VM gets two vCPUs and 2GB of RAM space.
Since OLTP testing with our own vApus stress testing software is still in beta, our fourth VM uses a freely available test: "Calling Circle" of the Oracle Swingbench Suite. Swingbench is a free load generator designed by Dominic Giles to stress test an Oracle database. We tested the same way as we have tested before, with one difference: we use an OLTP database that is only 2.7GB (instead of 9.5GB). The OLTP test runs on the Oracle 11g R2 64-bit on top of Windows 2008 Enterprise R2 (64-bit). Data is placed on an Intel X25-E SLC SSD, with logs on a separate SSD. This is done for each Calling Circle VM to avoid storage bottlenecks. The OLTP VM gets four vCPUs.
Notice that our total vCPU count is 18 (8 + 3 x 2 + 4). The advantage of using 18 vCPUs per tile is it will not be straightforward to schedule virtual CPUs on almost every CPU configuration. You might remember from our previous testing that if the number of virtual CPUs is a multiple of the number of physical cores, the server gets a performance advantage over other systems.
Careful monitoring (ESXtop) showed us that four tiles of vApus Mark II (72 vCPUs) were enough to keep the fastest system at an average of 96.5% CPU utilization during performance measurements.
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davegraham - Wednesday, August 11, 2010 - link
which is actually why you should be using a Cisco C460 for this type of test.dave
MySchizoBuddy - Wednesday, August 11, 2010 - link
Is there an exact correlation with number of cores and VMs. How many VMs can a 48 core system support.Let's assume you want 100 systems virtualized. What's the minimum number of cores that will handle those 100 VMs.
dilidolo - Wednesday, August 11, 2010 - link
Depends on how many vCPU and memory you assign to each VM and how much physical memory your server has. CPU is rarely the bottleneck , memory and storage are.Then not all the VMs have the same workload. So no one can really answer your question.
davegraham - Wednesday, August 11, 2010 - link
was going to say that a small amount of memory oversubscription is "ok" depending on the workload but you'd want that buffered with something a little more powerful than spinning disk (SSD, for example).tech6 - Wednesday, August 11, 2010 - link
The parameters for determining the optimal configuration for VMWare go well beyond just which CPU is faster. I like the AT stories about server tech but there need to be broader considerations of server features.1. Many applications are memory limited and not CPU bound so the memory flexibility may trump CPU power. That is why 256Gb with a dual 75xx or 6xxx series CPU in an 810 may well be the better choice than either a quad socket or dual socket 56xx configuration.
2. Software licensing is a big part of choosing the server as it is often licensed per socket. Sometime more cores and more memory is cheaper than more sockets.
3. Memory reliability is another major issue. Large amounts of plain ECC memory will most likely result in problems 2-3 years after deployment. The platforms available with the 6xxx and 75xx series CPUs support memory reliability features that often make it a better choice for VM data centers.
4. Power and density is another major issue which drive data center costs that must be given consideration when reviewing servers.
don_k - Wednesday, August 11, 2010 - link
Would like to see some non-windows VM benchmarks as well as a different virtualisation application used and by extension an SQL server that does not come from microsoft. Also would like to see benchmarks on para-virtualised VMs along with full hardware virtualised VMs.The review as is is quite meaningless to anyone that does not run windows VMs and/or does not use VMware.
You do have oracle on a windows VM so maybe oracle on a solaris/bsd VM as well as oracle on a linux para-virtualised guest.
There is also no mention of how, if at all, the VMs were optimised for the workloads they are running. In particular and most importantly how are the DBs using the disks? Where is the data and where are the logs? How are the disks passed on to the VM (local file, separate partition, virtual volume, full access to one/more drives etc etc).
Way too many variables to make any kind of an accurate conclusion in my opinion.
phoenix79 - Wednesday, August 11, 2010 - link
I'm curious as to why you didn't include a quad-socket Magny-Cours system. I would have been very interested to see how it would have stacked up in this article.Stuka87 - Wednesday, August 11, 2010 - link
Ditto, I would like to see the best from each CPU maker. To really see which has the best price:performance ratio.davegraham - Wednesday, August 11, 2010 - link
if vApus II was available i could run it on my Magny-Cours.dave
JohanAnandtech - Thursday, August 12, 2010 - link
The Dell R815 and quad MC deserve an article on their own.