Archive for the category Margaret Lewis
Simply Spectacular Virtualization Part II
Posted by Margaret Lewis in 10:11 am
(8 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
Loading ...AMD recently received a series of comments via Twitter from Intel about the configurations used for the “VMmark Systems” in the “Simply Spectacular Virtualization” blog. They wanted us to re-price our 64GB machine based on 8×8GB memory configuration. The last “tweet” closed with the comment, “We then win.”
Since the question was raised – I have reconfigured the VMmark systems as of May 6, 2009. I have listed valid memory configurations for the systems that match the total amount of memory used in the VMmark benchmark.
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Processor Model |
Memory Config |
VMmark Score |
System cost (cpu, memory, controller, one disk) |
Cost Comparison VMmark Systems |
Cost per VM |
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HP ProLiant DL370 G6 |
Intel® Xeon® W5580 3.20 GHz |
PC3 10600R 12 X 8GB 2Rank Memory |
23.96@16 tiles; 96 VMs (6×16 tiles) |
$27,407 |
~158% higher system cost* |
$285 |
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HP ProLiant DL370 G6 |
Intel® Xeon® W5580 3.20 GHz |
PC3 8500R 12 X 8GB 2Rank Memory |
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$18,787 |
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HP ProLiant DL385 G5 |
AMD Opteron™ 2384 2.7 GHz |
PC2 5300 8 x8GB |
11.28@8 tiles; 48 VMs (6×8 tiles) |
$10,642 |
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$222 |
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HP ProLiant DL385 G5 |
AMD Opteron™ 2384 2.7 GHz |
PC2-6400 LP 16 x 4GB Dual Rank Memory |
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$5,838 |
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HP ProLiant DL385 G5 |
AMD Opteron™ 2384 2.7 GHz |
PC2-6400 16 x 4GB Dual Rank Memory |
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$5,518 |
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Processor Model |
Memory Config |
VMmark Score |
System cost (cpu, memory, controller, one disk) |
Cost Comparison VMmark Systems |
Cost per VM |
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Dell PowerEdge R710 |
Intel® Xeon® X5570, 2.93Ghz |
96GB Memory (12×8GB), 1066MHz Dual Ranked |
24@17 tiles; 102 VMs (6×17 tiles) |
$21,135 |
~123% higher system cost* |
$209 |
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Dell PowerEdge R805 |
AMD Opteron™ 2384, 2.7GHz |
64GB Memory, 8×8GB, 667MHz, Dual Ranked |
11.22@8 tiles; 48 VMs (6×8 tiles) |
$9,465
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$197 |
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Dell PowerEdge R805 |
AMD Opteron™ 2384, 2.7GHz |
64GB Memory, 16×4GB, 667MHz, Dual Ranked DIMM |
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$5,357 |
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Dell PowerEdge R805 |
AMD Opteron™ 2384, 2.7GHz |
64GB (16×4GB), 800MHz, Dual Ranked |
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$5,357 |
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* All cost comparisons are based on the difference in total system cost of the Intel processor-based system corresponding to the VMmark scores noted above, compared to the total cost for the AMD Opteron™ processor-based system referred to in the corresponding section of the above chart. Prices are based on configurations submitted on OEM (Dell and HP) online system configuration tools as of May 7, 2009.
Now instead of focusing on who wins – AMD or Intel – let’s focus on details that are probably more important to customers who are really using these systems. As is shown in the chart above, with systems based on the AMD Opteron™ processor Model 2384, there are more options of memory speeds and DIMM configurations when purchasing 64GB of memory. This provides the ability to choose in terms of system price or performance. I think this kind of choice puts the customer in the winner seat.
For another look at system configurations and pricing I suggest you go to the Solutions Oriented Blog.
Margaret Lewis (@margaretjlewis) is a Product Marketing Director at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Simply Spectacular Virtualization
Posted by Margaret Lewis in 8:25 pm
Seems like the industry wants to treat virtualization like a “high performance computing” workload. There is a growing obsession with hardware vendors (including AMD) to tout top VMmark benchmark scores. The truth is any analysis of virtualization performance needs to consider more than just “raw performance.” So let’s go “beyond the score” and take a closer look at the systems posting some of the top VMmark scores.
First, a short bit on VMmark . VMmark is a consolidation benchmark that generates an aggregate score of individual VMs for a given number of tiles. A tile is six VMs running common load-generation tools that represent typical workloads: web server, file server, mail server, database, java server as well as an idle VM. One client computer is used to generate the load for one tile.
Looking at top VMmark scores you find systems that can run over 100 VMs per server. And there is a lot of chatter about how a 2 Socket Intel Xeon “Gainestown” processor-based server can run 16 tiles (or 96 VMs). However, there is no reference to the cost of the systems posting scores. VMmark documents the system configuration for the benchmark so you can take a stab at pricing these configurations on-line at the hardware vendor sites. (See slides 3 and 4 of presentation) In doing so we found that some of the top VMmark Intel Xeon “Gainestown” processor-based server configurations price out at about 175% and in some cases even higher than the top performing AMD Opteron™ processor (“Shanghai”) configurations (based on April 16, 2009 prices). Even in the performance-oriented high performance computing world this would turn heads. Cost does matter.
Going a step further, we now have the information to evaluate the price/performance of some of these systems by taking the estimated system cost and dividing it by number of VMs achieved during the VMmark run. While large number of VMs might be impressive – most IT professionals in today’s economy are focused on balancing performance and price—looking at the cost per VM helps to better understand the cost of putting the system in action. What you find is the system with the top VMmark score is not the system that gives you the best cost per VM.
Now that we have looked at the VMmark systems configurations, what type of virtualization configurations are customers really running? When looking at customer case studies posted on hardware and software vendors’ sites we find servers configurations ranging from 16GB to 64G of memory as more of the norm. We also don’t find many data centers pushing 100 VMs on a system. Responses to SearchDataCenter.com’s 2008 Purchasing Intentions Survey reveals that only 5% of respondents are running more than 25 VMs on a server – 61% are running less than 10 VMs per server and 33% are running 10 to 25 VMs per server. And since many customers are implementing virtualization as a cost saving strategy – we don’t see many of these customers buying the top bin “performance” processor models, which by design tend to consume the most power.
We did the pricing on systems configurations using energy efficient processors and more typical memory configurations for virtualization (again based on April 16, 2009 pricing), comparing both system pricing and cost per VMs (see slide 5 of presentation). Take a look for yourself. We think you will agree considering performance and price can give you a better view of its overall value.
So the question remains: how do *you* define “simply spectacular” virtualization? Is it in terms of raw performance or is it price/performance? Hopefully after reading this post, you have a different answer than when you started.
Margaret Lewis (@margaretjlewis) is a Product Marketing Director at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Don’t Be Fooled (Again)
Posted by Margaret Lewis in 12:17 pm
As April Fools’ Day approaches, I remember Pavlov’s dog and just how conditioned we all can be – particularly in terms of technology. Swap the “n” and “m” keys on someone’s keyboard or change the language setting on your friend’s Internet browser and see how long it takes your victim to figure out exactly what has happened. These changes are hard to catch because the assumptions you make when you sit at your computer – the location of keys or language settings of your software – aren’t meshing with reality. You have to challenge the validity of your assumptions before you can fully comprehend the situation.
If someone asked you to identify the top performing and most energy efficient server processors that have been shipping for the last four months – what would you say? If you answered Intel “Harpertown” or “Nehalem” processors you would be wrong. The 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor (code name “Shanghai”) has been shipping since November 2008, and has steadily gained solid marks in a variety of benchmarks, application performance evaluations, and power comparisons. More importantly, it’s gained the accolades of end customers who deploy AMD-based servers and rely not only on its performance, but on its energy saving properties and ease of management. Once again, assumptions and reality don’t always mesh.
Now you can accuse me of being an AMD “fanboy,” but the facts, not hype, support my position. Take a look at a couple of recent articles in Ars Technica and InfoWorld that make the same case I just did for “Shanghai” using third party performance and power evaluations.
One area where the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor really shines is virtualization. Currently the AMD-based Sun Fire X4600 MS server holds the record for the most virtual machines (114) on a server with VMware’s VMmark test running with VMware ESX 3.5U3, the currently shipping version of this hypervisor. A demo video posted on YouTube showcases the ability to perform a live migration between all generations of Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors with VMware ESX 3.5U3 – even our new 6-core “Istanbul” product which is due to release in the second half of 2009. John Troyer from VMware’s VMTN Blog was a guest on the AMD Virtualization blog and he showcased the combined benefit of AMD-V™ Rapid Virtualization Indexing and VMware ESX 3.5 for scaling a web serving environment on a HP ProLiant DL585 G5 server running theSPECweb2005 benchmark with Apache web serving software. Now that’s a mouthful, but it’s a real-world scenario that could easily be taking place in enterprise data centers today.
Let’s add another dose of reality. According to the survey by Enterprise Strategy Group the average number of virtual machines per physical server is between 5 and 10 – a far cry from the record 114. Live migration, such as VMware’s VMotion, is a much in demand feature but it requires a specialized infrastructure and does not support heterogeneous (AMD and Intel) processor environments. And while VMmark and SPECweb2005 benchmarks provide a way to evaluate performance aspects of servers, they don’t take into consideration what are perhaps the two major decision factors for most IT groups – the cost of the system and its power consumption. These realities don’t make the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor any less of a virtualization powerhouse – but it does show you what happens when you go beyond easy assumptions. As technology providers we should have an obligation to provide you with both “hype” and facts.
The server industry is on the cusp of a huge hype cycle that will go on for the next few weeks and you will be pounded with information meant to drive buying decisions solely based on assumptions. My advice – let’s not be fooled into making decisions based on automatic conditioning. Otherwise we night end up with many errors we need to correct.
Margaret Lewis is a Product Marketing Director at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
The times they are a’changing…
Posted by Margaret Lewis in 6:53 am
Leading into this year’s VMWorld conference in Las Vegas, all the buzz was about changes at VMWare. And after attending the conference, I’m here to tell you that the times they are a’changing. But it’s not all bad news for VMWare – and is an unique opportunity for the emerging virtualization ecosystem.
Sure, there’s new management at VMware, a repositioning to the operating system for the virtual datacenter, and lots of new competition. But what struck me even more than those changes are the fact that the x86 virtualization movement, started all those years ago by Diane and Mendel, is going mainstream, and that’s very very exciting for someone like me, who’s in charge of helping making sure AMD’s customers have the best experience possible in running software on AMD hardware.
One proof point is just the sheer amount of attention VMWorld is getting this year. Who would have ever thought the conference that attracted 1,600 early adopters of x86 virtualization to San Diego in Nov. 2004 would be hosting 14,000 mainstream IT professionals in Sept. 2008? And that the New York Times would write so much about a technology as enterprise focused as virtualization! I think this demonstrates the power that virtualization is already playing in shaping the future of the computing industry.
A second proof point is the amazing number of new servers I see being introduced by everyone from large OEMs to small system builders that are specifically aimed at serving as excellent virtualization solutions. For example both Dell and HP have recently introduced blades based on the energy efficient Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor that are designed to handle the rigors of memory-intensive virtualization.
A final proof point that virtualization has gone mainstream is the thriving ecosystem developing around virtualization. Just take a look at the presentations that were given in AMD’s own booth at the show – our “Master of Virtualization” theater was filled with small and large ISVs and IHVs who were showcasing how they are moving the needle on virtualization – including 3Leaf, Broadcom, Citrix, DataRam, Egenera, Microsoft, Novell, Sun, Transitive, Parallels, and Virtual Iron.
So what’s next in these times of change? I believe that as virtualization pushes it way into the main stream – and lights up discussions around topics such as cloud computing, virtual infrastructure, and dynamic data center fabrics – the virtualization ecosystem needs to understand that interoperability, open standards, and vendor cooperation has to be paramount. Customers are looking for choice – and not for technologies designed to lock out competition. They want live migration of virtual machines across different processors and tools that can manage virtual machines created by any hypervisor. Feel free to contact me and we can follow up with more information.
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Margaret Lewis is a Product Marketing Director at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied. |
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