Evaluating Futuremark's Servermark VDI on the Supermicro SYS-5028D-TN4T
by Ganesh T S on September 1, 2016 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Benchmarks
- Futuremark
- Supermicro
- Servers
- Xeon-D
Concluding Remarks
Coming to the business end of the article, there are two separate aspects to discuss - the hardware that we used in this evaluation, and the Servermark VDI benchmark itself.
Supermicro's SYS-5028D-TN4T is the perfect machine for IT enthusiasts and tinkerers to experiment with various virtualization tools. In addition to being compact and relatively silent, it is also frugal in terms of power consumption. Our review configuration idled around 35W, and even subjecting the unit to AIDA64's system stability test with all aspects loaded pushed the unit up to 105W only. The availability of dual native 10GBASE-T ports more than justify its current street price. It does have some drawbacks in terms of chassis design (placement of USB ports and the design of the hot-swap bays) and the access to internal components is not hassle-free. However, these are minor aspects in the grand scheme of things. Readers looking to invest in a virtualization lab machine would do little wrong in opting for the Supermicro SYS-5028D-TN4T.
Futuremark's Servermark has been in development for quite some time. Their PCMark offering is undoubtedly very well respected in the desktop benchmarking circles. It is therefore logical that they are trying to use that to move into the server benchmarking space. There are plenty of configurable options to make the usage of multiple PCMark instances a valid virtualization benchmark. In particular, the duty cycle parameter enables IT administrators / benchmark users to have a better fit between the evaluation and the expected workloads on the server.
Futuremark's aim with Servermark VDI appears to be two-fold. On one hand, they want to provide IT administrators with a tool to evaluate how many virtual desktops they can allocate on a particular server. On the other hand, they also want to supply server vendors with a marketing tool. Armed with a Servermark VDI certificate, the vendors can make a better pitch to business users. The certificate can also help the latter to consider the right server offering for their needs.
Futuremark's Servermark VDI faces stiff competition from existing well-established benchmarks such as SPEC's SPECvirt_sc2013, LoginVSI's offerings and even VMWare's own VMMark. Perfecting a server / VDI benchmark is a tough task, and this field is obviously not as crowded as the desktop benchmarking arena. Therefore, Servermark VDI is definitely a welcome addition. In our opinion, the results delivered by it are based on solid benchmarking and can help users arrived at independent and reliable conclusions.
Futuremark indicated that the future plans for Servermark VDI include expanded support for more virtualization environments beyond VMWare, including Hyper-V. In addition, once PCMark 10 gets released, Servermark will support it as well.
VDI is only one server application. We believe Futuremark is evaluating other server application scenarios also. Specific server benchmarks focusing on particular server aspects like, say, the data store / disk subsystem would also be welcome. In its current beta state, Servermark VDI seems to have had a promising start in the evaluation of server systems. We expect / hope that more stakeholders are providing feedback to Futuremark in order to add more features to Servermark and fine-tune its current features.
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18 Comments
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ddriver - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link
Absent a base for comparison, those marks are a meaningless metric.ganeshts - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link
Intent of the article is to show what Servermark VDI is, and how it can be used. Benchmark numbers are secondary.Also, benchmark numbers can be compared within the same 'set' to show how increasing the load on the server causes a drop in the effectiveness of the server.
Lastly, the benchmark numbers are just PCMark 8 Work preset scores. Plenty of PCs have been evaluated with that benchmark. Here is a graph from our latest mini-PC review with PCMark 8 work scores : http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph10595/pcm8... - so that you can get an idea of the performance of the Xeon-D 1540 -equipped server against some of the more powerful mini-PCs.
lioncat55 - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link
While I did not read the full article and I agree this is more about what the software can do. I believe it would help to see the benchmark numbers from the PCMark 8 Work preset to show how much of a difference there is from a single session to 2+ VMs.It does seem like this server is a bit under powered for VM work. Any word on when there might be a follow up? It would be a lot more interesting to see some numbers that show how much of a change there is as you add more VMs.
extide - Wednesday, September 7, 2016 - link
You probably should have read the article then, because it DOES show the scores as they change vs the number of VM's...powerarmour - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link
What is the point of this article exactly?, Advertising?ganeshts - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link
Oh, right.. that is why we mention competitors like SPEC and LoginVSI? Never knew advertising meant talking about competitors in good light!!Futuremark is well respected in benchmarking circles, and we were given the opportunity to beta-test their upcoming product. Anyone interested in performance evaluation of computing systems would jump in at this opportunity. We did, and we thought it would be interesting to share our impressions with readers - they can give their own feedback to Futuremark.
No solicitation is made in this article to get readers to go out and 'purchase' Servermark - In fact, it is not even available for purchase yet.
Don't impugn the editorial integrity of the writers here who spend countless hours in attempting to present a fair and balanced view of hardware and software of interest to the computing community. It is insulting to read comments like this.
powerarmour - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link
FM is thoroughly decent company which I have no issue with. But I do have issues with articles about software which have no base for comparisons. You might mean well and intend to present in a fair and balanced method, but it sure doesn't come across like it.Then again, if you don't care for the opinions of your readers, then I can clearly see why these kind of articles are becoming more common.
ganeshts - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link
What is your rationale for saying : "it sure doesn't come across like it" ?You have made an insinuation without properly backing up your comment.
We value opinions of all readers, and we will hear them out if they are presented in the right manner with proper reasoning - definitely can't respond with 'care' if they are off-the-cuff remarks that are baseless and demeaning to the efforts put by the editor.
powerarmour - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link
My rationale is that this type of software ideally needs to be OS agnostic, and not limited to a Windows platform. There is no critique in the article to mention that, and it comes off as a one dimensional viewpoint, which is quite far away from typical server usage, especially in VM workloads.ganeshts - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link
That would not be a valid criticism of Futuremark's efforts. The aim of Servermark *VDI* is to test how many virtual desktops a server can support. Almost all office environments that use *VDI* do so with Windows as the guest environment. I do agree that when it comes to *VMs*, a lot of them are Linux-based and the like - but it is very rare to see Linux desktops as part of VDI in office environments.Futuremark had a particular scenario in mind while framing Servermark VDI, and I have to say that they are doing the right thing for that scenario.
What would be valid is that they did not supply benchmarking environment scripts for non-VMWare environments, and we had to develop our own. Futuremark has taken this feedback and promised to provide support for Hyper-V also in the final release. This, I have pointed out as a drawback that Futuremark will address in the future.
We can only point out valid issues in the review, and we have done that on the basis of our hands-on evaluation of the benchmark.