Facebook's "Open Compute" Server tested
by Johan De Gelas on November 3, 2011 12:00 AM ESTIntroducing Our Open Virtualization Benchmark
vApus Mark II has been our own virtualization benchmark suite that tests how well servers cope with virtualizing "heavy duty applications". We explained the benchmark methodology here. The beauty of vApus Mark II is that:
- We test with real-world applications used in enterprises all over the world
- We can measure response times
- It can scale from 8 to 80 thread servers
- It is lightweight on the client side: one humble client is enough to bring the most massive server to its knees. For a virtualizated server or cluster, you only need a few clients.
There is one big disadvantage, however: the OLAP and web applications are the intellectual property of several software vendors, so we can't let third parties verify our tests. To deal with this, the Sizing Servers Lab developed a new benchmark, called vApus For Open Source workloads, in short vApus FOS.
vApus FOS uses a similar methodology as vApus Mark II with "tiles". The exact software configuration may still change a bit as we tested with the 0.9 version. One vApus FOS 0.9 tile uses four different VMs, consisting of:
- A PhpBB (Apache2, MySQL) website with one virtual CPU and 1GB RAM. The website uses about 8GB of disk space. We simulate up to 50 concurrent uses with press keys every 0.6 to 2.4 s.
- The same VM but with two vCPUs.
- An OLAP MySQL database that is used by an online webshop. The VM gets two vCPUs and 1GB RAM. The database is about 1GB, with up to 500 connections active.
- Last but not least: the Zimbra VM. VMware's open source groupware offering is by far the most I/O intensive VM. This VM gets two vCPUs and 2GB RAM, with up to 100 concurrent users active.
All VMs are based on minimal CentOS 5.6 with VMware Tools installed. vApus FOS can also be run on different hypervisors: we already tried using KVM, but encountered a lot of KVM specific problems.
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jhh - Saturday, November 5, 2011 - link
I'm not sure how much of the benchmarks depend on network bandwidth, but Facebook certainly does a lot of it. Using SRIOV based NICs and supporting drivers allows the VM to access virtual NIC hardware directly, without having to go through the hypervisor. But, all NICs aren't built equal, many of them do not support SRIOV, and those that do, may not have drivers which support it in older kernels such as Centos 5.6. Unfortunately, since most Gigabit NICs were designed before SRIOV, most gigabit NICs don't support it. We have great difficulty getting hardware vendors to describe whether the provide SRIOV capable hardware or Linux drivers. The newer 10G NICs tend to support SRIOV, but whether the server needs more than 1G is unclear, and the 10G NICs are more expensive and use more power.CPU-Hog - Sunday, November 6, 2011 - link
Good comparison of the servers however I couldn't help but think how much better it would be if we ran actual workloads that facebook etc plan to run in the datacenter vs. these enterprise workloads. How about running MemcacheD / Hadoop / HipHop etc. which are the key workloads the OpenCompute servers are designed to run well.Many of these workloads need large IO and memory vs. high compute. It will also be interesting to then use the same benchmarks to compare future servers based on technology from newbies like Calxeda, SeaMicro and AppliedMicro.
Xeon and Opterons based servers vs. ARM and Atom based servers. Now that battle of the old guard vs, the upstarts will be worth seeing.
trochevs - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
Johan,Thank you for excellent article. I love to read about cutting edge technology. Keep with the good work. But, I notice something that nobody in the comments has mention yet. In the last paragraph:
"... being inspired by open source software (think ..., ..., iOS, ...)."
iOS is a Open Source Software?! When this happen?
mrgadgetgeek - Thursday, November 10, 2011 - link
Since these systems are custom designed by Facebook engineers, I'm guessing you can't purchase anything like it, correct? Will that change with that foundation that Open Compute announced recently?artemisgoldfish - Thursday, November 10, 2011 - link
Getting Power One to design a supply just right requires a LOT of testing. It's also strange to me that the supply only takes 200-277VAC. The Power One AC supplies I'm familiar with do 90VAC to 264VAC and pass 80PLUS Gold, maybe the tighter input range helps them tune it for more efficiency.ahmetmy330 - Friday, December 30, 2016 - link
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