Real-world virtualization benchmarking: the best server CPUs compared
by Johan De Gelas on May 21, 2009 3:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
vApus Mark I vs. VMmark
By now, it should be clear that vApus Mark I is not meant to replace VMmark or VConsolidate. The largest difference is that VMmark for example tries to mimic the "average" virtualized datacenter, while vApus Mark I clearly focuses on the heavier service oriented applications. vApus Mark I focuses on a smaller part of the market, while the creators of VMmark have invested a lot of thought into getting a nice mix of the typical applications found in a datacenter. We have listed the most important differences below.
| vApus Mark I compared to VMmark | ||
| vApus Mark I | VMmark | |
| Goal | Virtualization benchmarking across Guest OS, Hypervisor, and Hardware | Measuring what the best hardware is for ESX |
| Reproducible by third parties | No; for now it's only available to AnandTech and Sizing Server Lab | Yes |
| Modeling | "Harder to virtualize", "heavy duty" applications | A balanced mix of virtualized applications in the "typical" datacenter |
| VMs | Large "heavy duty" VMs; 4GB with 4 VCPUs | Small VMs 0.5-2GB, 1-2 VCPUs |
| Market coverage | Small but important part of the market | Large part of datacenter market |
| Relevance to the real-world | Uses real-world applications | Uses industry standard benchmarks |
The advantages of vApus Mark I are the fact that we use real-world applications and test them as if they are loaded by real people. The advantages of VMmark are that it is available to everyone and it has a mix of applications that is closer to what is found in the majority of datacenters. vApus Mark I focuses more on heavy duty applications.
There's one small difference between the existing benchmarks like VMmark and VConsolidate and our "vApus Mark I" virtual test. VMmark and VConsolidate add additional groups of VMs (called tiles or CSUs) until the benchmark score does not increase anymore, or until all the system processors are fully utilized. Our virtualization benchmark tries to get close to 100% CPU load much quicker. This is a result of the fact that our VMs require relatively large amounts of memory: each VM needs 4GB. If we used a throttled load such as VMmark or VConsolidate, we would require massive amounts of memory to measure servers with 16 cores and more. Six VMs that make up a tile in VMmark take only 5GB, while our four VMs require 16GB. Our current monitoring shows that this benchmark could run in 10-11GB, and thanks to VMware's shared memory technique probably less than 9GB. With four VMs we can test up to 12 physical CPUs, or 16 logical CPUs (8 Physical + 8 SMT). We need eight VMs (or two "tiles") to fully stress 16 to 24 physical cores.
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Bandoleer - Thursday, May 21, 2009 - link
I have been running Vmware Virtual Infrastructure for 2 years now. While this article can be useful for someone looking for hardware upgrades or scaling of a virtual system, CPU and memory are hardly the bottlenecks in the real world. I'm sure there are some organizations that want to run 100+ vm's on "one" physical machine with 2 physical processors, but what are they really running????The fact is, if you want VM flexability, you need central storage of all your VMDK's that are accessible by all hosts. There is where you find your bottlenecks, in the storage arena. FC or iSCSI, where are those benchmarks? Where's the TOE vs QLogic HBA? Considering 2 years ago, there was no QLogic HBA for blade servers, nor does Vmware support TOE.
However, it does appear i'll be able to do my own baseline/benching once vSphere ie VI4 materializes to see if its even worth sticking with vmware or making the move to HyperV which already supports Jumbo, TOE iSCSI with 600% increased iSCSI performance on the exact same hardware.
But it would really be nice to see central storage benchmarks, considering that is the single most expensive investment of a virtual system.
duploxxx - Friday, May 22, 2009 - link
perhaps before you would even consider to move from Vmware to HyperV check first in reality what huge functionality you will loose in stead of some small gains in HyperV.ESX 3.5 does support Jumbo, iscsi offload adapters and no idea how you are going to gain 600% if iscsi is only about 15% slower then FC if you have decent network and dedicated iscsi box?????
Bandoleer - Friday, May 22, 2009 - link
"perhaps before you would even consider to move from Vmware to HyperV check first in reality what huge functionality you will loose in stead of some small gains in HyperV. "what you are calling functionality here are the same features that will not work in ESX4.0 in order to gain direct hardware access for performance.
Bandoleer - Friday, May 22, 2009 - link
The reality is I lost around 500MBps storage throughput when I moved from Direct Attached Storage. Not because of our new central storage, but because of the limitations of the driver-less Linux iSCSI capability or the lack there of. Yes!! in ESX 3.5 vmware added Jumbo frame support as well as flow control support for iSCSI!! It was GREAT, except for the part that you can't run JUMBO frames + flow control, you have to pick one, flow control or JUMBO.I said 2 years ago there was no such thing as iSCSI HBA's for blade servers. And that ESX does not support the TOE feature of Multifunction adapters (because that "functionality" requires a driver).
Functionality you lose by moving to hyperV? In my case, i call them useless features, which are second to performance and functionality.
JohanAnandtech - Friday, May 22, 2009 - link
I fully agree that in many cases the bottleneck is your shared storage. However, the article's title indicated "Server CPU", so it was clear from the start that this article would discuss CPU performance."move to HyperV which already supports Jumbo, TOE iSCSI with 600% increased iSCSI performance on the exact same hardware. "
Can you back that up with a link to somewhere? Because the 600% sounds like an MS Advertisement :-).
Bandoleer - Friday, May 22, 2009 - link
My statement is based on my own experience and findings. I can send you my benchmark comparisons if you wish.I wasn't ranting at the article, its great for what it is, which is what the title represents. I was responding to this part of the article that accidentally came out as a rant because i'm so passionate about virtualization.
"What about ESX 4.0? What about the hypervisors of Xen/Citrix and Microsoft? What will happen once we test with 8 or 12 VMs? The tests are running while I am writing this. We'll be back with more. Until then, we look forward to reading your constructive criticism and feedback.
Sorry, i meant to be more constructive haha...
JohanAnandtech - Sunday, May 24, 2009 - link
"My statement is based on my own experience and findings. I can send you my benchmark comparisons if you wish. "Yes, please do. Very interested in to reading what you found.
"I wasn't ranting at the article, its great for what it is, which is what the title represents. "
Thx. no problem...Just understand that these things takes time and cooperation of the large vendors. And getting the right $5000 storage hardware in lab is much harder than getting a $250 videocard. About 20 times harder :-).
Bandoleer - Sunday, May 24, 2009 - link
I haven't looked recently, but high performance tiered storage was anywhere from $40k - $80k each, just for the iSCSI versions, the FC versions are clearly absurd.solori - Monday, May 25, 2009 - link
Look at ZFS-based storage solutions. ZFS enables hybrid storage pools and an elegant use of SSDs with commodity hardware. You can get it from Sun, Nexenta or by rolling-your-own with OpenSolaris:http://solori.wordpress.com/2009/05/06/add-ssd-to-...">http://solori.wordpress.com/2009/05/06/add-ssd-to-...
pmonti80 - Friday, May 22, 2009 - link
Still it would be interesting to see those central storage benchmarks or at least knowing if you will/won't be doing them for whatever reason.