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Update on 2-Socket and 4-Socket Servers for Virtualization

In a previous white paper, a comparison between Dell 2-socket and HP 4-socket servers running a series of workloads on VMware® ESX Server was made. At the time of testing, the two systems used were the most powerful available configurations available for the Dell™ PowerEdge™ 2950 and HP Proliant DL585. This timing means the comparison was between two 8-core servers: a two-socket, quad-core server and a four-socket, dual-core server. The conclusion of that paper was that the two-socket, quad-core server was better for virtualization based on performance, price/performance, and performance per watt.

The Dell PowerEdge R900 is a four-socket, quad-core server with 16 cores total. This number of cores puts it more on par with the Dell 2950 two-socket server in terms of processing power per socket, as both the PowerEdge 2950 and PowerEdge R900 are using quad-core processors. To determine how this current-generation four-socket server compares with the Dell two-socket server in the previous test, a PowerEdge R900 with four Intel® Xeon® X7350 processors and 128 GB of RAM was run through the same tests in June 2008. The test environment from the previous test still existed, so the test was reproduced in every way. The same virtual machines (VMs), the same storage, and the same DVD store test application were used. The table below summarizes the configuration of the PowerEdge R900 used in the new test and the PowerEdge 2950 from the previous tests.

	PowerEdge 2950	PowerEdge R900
Virtualization software	VMware ESX Server 3.0.1	VMware ESX Server 3.5
Processor	Two quad-core Intel Xeon X5355 processors at 2.66 GHz with 8MB cache (shared)	Four quad-core Intel Xeon X7350 processors at 2.93 GHz with 8MB cache
Frontside bus	1,333 MHz	1,066 MHz
Memory	16 GB (8x 667 MHz fully buffered 2GB DIMMs)	128 GB (32x 667Mhz fully buffered 4GB DIMMS)
Internal disks	Two Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) 146 GB, 15,000 rpm drives	Two Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) 73 GB, 15,000 rpm drives
Network interface card (NIC)	Two 10/100/1,000 Mbps internal NICs	Two 10/100/1,000 Mbps internal NICs
Disk controller	PERC 5/i	PERC 6/i

Please see the previous paper for configuration details on the storage, VMs, and DVD Store test application, which were kept the same for this test.

Testing

Only the Microsoft® SQL Server® and SUSE® LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) tests were repeated for this update. As this is only a quick update and not a complete performance study, it was determined that two data points would be enough.

To have a common point for comparison, the number of VMs was held constant with respect to the earlier paper. Specifically 32 SQL Server VMs and 44 MySQL VMs were used for testing on the PowerEdge R900 to match the number of VMs that originally drove the PowerEdge 2950 to approximately 85 percent utilization. The workload on each VM was then increased to drive CPU utilization close to 85 percent on the PowerEdge R900, which was done by increasing the number of DVD Store user threads for each VM. For the SQL Server VMs and the MySQL VMs, the number of threads was tripled to drive the server to approximately 85 percent CPU utilization.

Results

The performance of the PowerEdge R900 is much better than the performance of the PowerEdge 2950 tested in the earlier paper. This result is expected because it’s a much newer server and has twice as many cores and four times as much memory. Not surprisingly, given that there are twice as many processors, power consumption is also much higher. The trade-off results in a performance per watt number for the SQL Server and MySQL tests that are 10 percent and 23 percent better, respectively, for the PowerEdge R900; although, the raw performance of the PowerEdge R900 is well over twice that of the PowerEdge 2950. The complete results are in the tables below.

SQL Server VMs Test	PowerEdge 2950 with Intel Xeon X5355	PowerEdge R900 with Intel Xeon X7350
VMs	32	32
User Threads Per VM	4	12
% CPU Utilization	85	86
Orders Per Minute	29346	72386
Avg Watts	449	1007
Performance Per Watt	65	72	R900 is 10 % better

SLES LAMP VMs Test	PowerEdge 2950 with Intel Xeon X5355	PowerEdge R900 with Intel Xeon X7350
VMs	44	44
User Threads Per VM	1	3
% CPU Utilization	86	88
Orders Per Minute	9852	27582
Avg Watts	447	1019
Performance Per Watt	22	27	R900 is 23 % better

Conclusions

An increase in performance per watt in the range of 10 to 20 percent shows that the new Dell PowerEdge R900 is not only more powerful than the previous generation PowerEdge 2950, but is also more efficient.

TDA-James	Latest page update: made by TDA-James , Jan 13 2010, 7:06 PM EST (about this update About This Update Edited by TDA-James 1 word added 1 word deleted view changes - complete history)
	Keyword tags: 2-socket 4-socket dl585 esx performance price/performance virtualization More Info: links to this page

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mellinium_man

need a DR site and virtualisation.

Jun 28 2010, 3:25 PM EDT by JOHNADCO

Thread started: Jun 28 2010, 2:58 AM EDT Watch

Hi,
we have site of production server located in bombay with seven application to be hosted. six are .net application while one is java application. the java application uses mysql db while others use sql server. we need to have a DR site at bangalore. Also, if anything goes wrong at bombay site, the bangalore site should take over seamlessly. I contacted various beig vendors and believe me, from everyone i got different solution with heave cost attached to it. i dont know which one to go with. or what could be a most viable solution.
The best solution that was offered to me is as follows:
have two server at Mumbai like dell R905 with 32 GB ram. install applications on one machine with 7 VMs and on other machine should be 7 VM with DB's. these should be clustered with two server with similar configuration and setup in bangalore as DR. in case something goes wrong with any one server of any site, other takes over.

Pls comment.

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todd_muirhead

Performance Improvement Due to ESX 3.5?

Jul 29 2008, 12:20 AM EDT by todd_muirhead

Thread started: Jul 14 2008, 2:14 PM EDT Watch

I recently got an email from asking about the testing results published on this page. The question was how much of the improvement in peformance could be linked to the upgrade from ESX 3.0.1 to ESX 3.5?

The answer is that I didn't do the R900 test with ESX 3.0.1, so it is not possible to say how much of the performance advantage that the R900 has is due to ESX 3.5. I can say that with the upgrade from ESX 2.5 to ESX 3.0.1 I did some testing with the same workload on the same server and found that performance was about the same. I would guess that most of the performance advantage is due to the R900 based on this previous experience.

Todd