Posts tagged with VMWare
Energy Efficient Four-Socket Servers – REALLY?
Posted by Andy Parma in 9:27 pm
Loading ...As VMworld 2009 approaches, I’ve been thinking about virtualization and energy efficiency and how they apply to four-socket servers. I know what you’re thinking – isn’t an energy efficient four-socket server an oxymoron like a hybrid SUV?
First, let’s take a closer look at how IT managers are actually using four-socket servers. It’s very rare for four-socket servers to be used strictly as a way to increase compute density. Appro and SGI have twin servers and half-depth servers to serve this purpose. In most cases, four-socket servers are used for applications that require a single server to have access to large amounts of memory. These applications typically consist of database, virtualization/consolidation, and some high performance computing applications. With the ability to support 32 memory DIMMs per server, optimized virtualization features such as AMD VirtualizationTM (AMD-VTM) technology, and unique energy efficiency features (AMD-P), Six-Core AMD OpteronTM 8400 series processors are ideal for these applications.
When comparing the feature sets of Six-Core AMD OpteronTM 8400 series processors and Intel Xeon 7400 series (”Dunnington”) processors, the feature set consistency of the AMD OpteronTM 8400 series processors is in stark contrast to the Intel Xeon 7400 series offerings. Four items about the Xeon 7400 series stand out:
- The feature set differs dramatically between each of the seven models in the Xeon 7400 series
- No Xeon 7400 series processor includes RVI or Tagged TLB virtualization features
- The low-power Xeon L7445 and L7455 do NOT include the same energy efficiency features as the highest performance Xeon X7460
- All Xeon 7400 series processors use Fully Buffered DIMM (FB-DIMM) memory
The feature set consistency of the AMD OpteronTM 8400 series processors gives customers a more predictable approach to data center planning and helps capacity planning, software image development, and validation efforts.
What about the performance and value of servers using these processors? If servers using Intel processors are clearly superior, then the differing feature sets won’t matter, right?
While the 46% VMmark performance advantage that a four-socket AMD OpteronTM 8400 series processor-based server has over the top-performing four-socket Intel Xeon 7400 series processor-based server is impressive, I think that the performance of energy efficient Six-Core AMD OpteronTM 8425 HE processor-based servers is even more impressive. This comparison shows that, depending on benchmark, a server using low-power Six-Core AMD OpteronTM processors can provide nearly double the server performance of a server using low-power Hex-Core Intel Xeon L7455 processors at nearly half the processor price. Servers using low-power Six-Core AMD OpteronTM 8425 HE processors even significantly outperform servers using the highest performance, highest power Hex Core Intel Xeon X7460 processors, again at nearly half the processor price.
When combined, all of these advantages (superior performance, energy efficiency, virtualization features, and pricing) make the Six-Core AMD Opteron 8400 series processors the ideal solution for four-socket servers.
Now, let’s go back to my original analogy about the hybrid SUV. In theory, the reason that people buy an SUV is because they need to move a lot of stuff, whether that’s people, groceries, or furniture. It’s the same way with four-socket servers – people buy a four-socket server because they need lots of memory to process lots of stuff, whether that’s database applications, virtualization/consolidation, or processing large datasets in high performance computing applications. Why shouldn’t you able to process lots of “stuff” and get energy efficiency too?
Andy Parma is a Product Marketing Manager for Server/Workstation products at AMD. His postings are his 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 Part II
Posted by Margaret Lewis in 10:11 am
(8 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)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.
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 Holy Grail of Virtualization
Posted by John Fruehe in 1:30 am
There are plenty of reasons that companies can give for keeping virtualization at an arm’s length instead of embracing it. In my conversations with customers, it’s difficult to find somebody that is not working with virtualization at some level.
But what keeps it from moving out of the lab and into production. Or, more succinctly, where is the mythical "line in the sand" that keeps people from moving applications. We know that things like file and print services, web services messaging and network infrastructure are all areas where customers are virtualizing. However there seems to be some "off limits" applications.
In some cases, these may be line of business applications where the application vendor specifically calls out that they will not support the application in a virtualized environment. Typically this has more to do with their own reluctance to support it than the fact that it won’t run on a virtual machine.
However, one line in the sand is performance. How many times have you heard someone say "I’m not willing to take the performance hit to run this application virtualized, I need the performance of a physical server"?
Well, that excuse is getting harder and harder to accept as the performance of a virtualized environment keeps getting closer and closer to the physical performance.
As a matter of fact, this week VMware released a new performance benchmark that shows web and Java services running faster on an HP DL585 G5 server (which is AMD Opteron processor-based, of course) than the performance of the same applications running "bare metal" – directly on a physical system. Under VMware ESX 3.5 the performance just edges out the previous benchmark by a hair.
Virtualized applications beating the same applications on physical servers? Is the end of the world as we know it? To some degree, yes, but in a good way. We’re seeing the beginning of a new era, where virtualization becomes the norm for just about any workload, and the differences between the physical and virtual worlds become more blurred. By the way you can attribute this success to features like AMD-V Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) and VMware’s optimized use of this technology.
Does this mean that all applications should be expected to run at native speeds in a virtualized environment? No, but more and more, that gap is quickly closing. We’re headed in that direction, in our quest for the holy grail of virtualization.
It’s going to be an interesting year, King Arthur would want a ring side seat for this one.
John Fruehe is the Director of Business Development for Server/Workstation products at AMD. His postings are his 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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