Should you bother with quad socket servers now that we have powerful dual socket platforms available? We...
October 6, 2009
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We test five different x86 rack servers that focus on reducing power requirements and keeping costs very...
July 22, 2009
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This is the second part of our ESX optimization tips and tricks, diving into storage optimization and...
June 29, 2009
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blog post by Liz van Dijk
If you've been keeping up with our articles for a while, you might have picked up on vApus Mark I: the virtualized stress test we created for internal use at the Sizing Servers testlab.
As detailed in Johan's article, this bench consists of 3 separate applications, all of which we are very familiar with due to extensive optimization and stress testing efforts. Although we believe the results published based on this bench speak for themselves, the problem remained that it was impossible for anyone outside our lab to verify the results, seeming as how two out of three of the applications used were owned by private companies and were entrusted to our lab under rather strict conditions (distributing them to the rest of the world sadly not being one of them).
Secondly, vApus M1 being a bench that focuses on fairly heavy VM's, we feel the need to create another point of reference. One that will back up the results of the original, but with a completely different mix of VM's.
Thus began the process of creating vApus For Open Source, or vApus FOS, as we like to call it in the lab.
The idea behind vApus FOS is that the VM's can be freely distributed to any vendors that wish to...
November 17, 2009, 8 comments
blog post by Johan De Gelas
First of all, we were pretty excited to see so many comments and votes (5000!) on our last IT poll. It is good to see that professional IT is so much alive at Anandtech.com. So yes, we should have updated this blog quicker, to keep the momentum going. The reason why this update comes rather late is -once again - that we are working on the much delayed hypervisor comparison. Hundreds of tests have already been done, but we have added more tests to check important I/O performance factors such as VMDq and iSCSI performance.
And of course, the virtualization market is evolving fast. There is a new kid on the block: KVM. Two of the three most important Linux vendors, Red Hat and Canonical, have ripped Xen out of their distributions in favor of KVM. KVM has an interesting philosophy: it simply adds two kernel modules to the Linux kernel to turn the latter into a hypervisor. As a result, KVM can leverage the huge amount of Linux drivers and the Linux kernel improvements such as power management. Still, a virtualization solution needs to mature quite a bit before it is ready. And that is more than a cliche. Xen's support for Windows VMs was for example supposed to work at the beginning of...
November 3, 2009, 30 comments
blog post by Johan De Gelas
If you read our last article, it is clear that when your applications are virtualized, you have a lot more options to choose from in order to build your server infrastructure . Let us know how you would build up your "dynamic datacenter" and why!
{poll 157:440}
...
October 7, 2009, 48 comments
blog post by Johan De Gelas
Take two Nehalem dies, turn them 90 degrees, add a lot of system interface logic and 8 MB extra of L3-cache and you get - very oversimplified - the impressive Nehalem EX, alias "Beckton". The new Xeon MP is an impressive monster, just like it's predecessor Dunnington. Dunnington consisted of 1.9 Billion transistors, the Xeon MP based on the "Nehalem" architecture will feature up to 2.3 Billion transistors.
Those 2.3 Bilion transistors are needed for
Up to eight cores, 16 threads thanks to SMT
Up to 24MB of shared L3 cache
four QuickPath links
four memory channels which support for up to 16 memory modules per socket
Intel calls the chips to drive the DDR-3 modules "Scalable Memory Buffer" chips, which means that Intel figured out that it is best to move the power gobbling AMB chip from the FBDIMMs to the systemboard. As you need only one chip to drive several registered DDR-3 modules, it consumes a lot less power than placing an AMB chip on each DIMM.
In the second of half of this year, Intel will have a IBM Power 6 killer and a server platform to match. The irony is that when it comes to...
May 27, 2009, 8 comments
blog post by Johan De Gelas
We promised you a new datapoint, a new independent virtualization benchmark in "a few days". Those "few days" have become a week in good "IT at Anandtech" tradition. :-) But this wednesday, unless Murphy strikes us hard, the article will be online. It will offer a refreshing look at the virtualization performance, the result of months of work. Liz will follow up quickly with a "performance optimization for virtualization" article.
Until then, we have updated two articles. We told you in one of our "Intel Nehalem vs AMD Istanbul" blogs, that you will have to wait for ESX 4.0 for EPT support. However, we found that "forcing hardware VMMU" (= EPT) improves performance tangible, so we wrote that ESX 3.5 update 4 has support for EPT. That is not true, at least not officially. EPT is only officially supported on ESX 4.0 (the hypervisor of vSphere 4.0). Check out the updates that we did to the last article, as it clarifies some of the VMmark benchmarking. Our thanks goes to Scott Drummonds of VMware for the excellent info.
The last update can be found in our "The Best Server CPUs part 2" article. We solved the problems with our Shanghai "exchange" server and...
May 19, 2009, 0 comments
blog post by Johan De Gelas
In our last article about server CPUs, I wrote:
"the challenge for AMD and Intel is to convince the rest of the market - that is 95% or so - that the new platforms provide a compelling ROI (Return On Investment). The most productive or intensively used servers in general get replaced every 3 to 5 years. Based on Intel's own inquiries, Intel estimates that the current installed base consists of 40% dual-core CPU servers and 40% servers with single-core CPUs."
At the end of the presentation of Pat Gelsinger (Intel) makes the point that replacing nine servers based on the old single core Xeons with one Xeon X5570 based server will result in a quick payback. Your lower energy bill will pay back your investment back in 8 months according to Intel.
Why these calculations are quite optimistic is beyond the scope of this blogpost, but suffice to say that Specjbb is a pretty bad benchmark to perform ROI calculations (it can be "inflated" too easiliy) and that Intel did not consider the amount of work it takes to install and configure those servers. However, Intel does have a point that replacing the old power hungry Xeons (irony...) will...
April 7, 2009, 23 comments
blog post by Johan De Gelas
My last post generated quite a bit of discussion, some of it based on misunderstandings. In this post I'll try to make a few things more clear. In a previous post, I pointed out that there are a good indications that a dual Nehalem EP has a 40 to 100% advantage over Shanghai (depending on the application, based on the SAP and Core i7 workstation benchmarks).
If Istanbul is introduced in the early part of H2 2009, AMD will have a small window of opportunity of competing with a hex-core versus a quad-core (Intel's Nehalem EP). Time will tell of course how small, large or non-existing this window will be.
In well threaded applications, the best a "hex-core Shanghai" can do is give about a 30-40% boost to performance compared to the current Shanghai, which is most likely not enough to close the gap with the upcoming Nehalem CPU (let alone the 32 nm hex-core version). However, Istanbul is more than a hex-core Shanghai. The improved memory controller and HT-assist can lower the latency of inter-CPU syncing and increase the effective memory bandwidth. For that reason, Istanbul will do better than just "a shanghai with 2 added cores" in many applications such as SAP, OLTP databases,...
February 27, 2009, 18 comments
blog post by Liz van Dijk
Now that the actual conference is behind us, and we've found our way back to the lab, it's time to finish what we started. First off, an apology for our radio silence on day 3: our schedule turned out to be quite a bit more packed than we thought it was, so finding our way to the quiet of the press room proved to be more of a hurdle than originally expected.
Since our main objective in attending the conference was to learn as much about virtualization as possible, rather than simply cover news flashes, we spent a lot of time in the breakout sessions, and I'm hoping to pour those into an article (or series of blogposts) for you as soon as possible.
On with the show! Last blog, I wrote about the first part of VMware's cloud strategy, being vCenter and vSphere, the continuations of today's Virtual Center and Virtual Infrastructure. Back then, I wondered just how exactly Fault Tolerance would be implemented, and in case you missed the comments of reader duploxxx and my own, I'll repeat what we learned here.
Essentially, most of the Fault Tolerance technology was leveraged from the Record/Replay feature present in VMware Workstation 6, allowing users to accurately...
February 27, 2009, 2 comments
blog post by Liz van Dijk
Here we are once more, blogging away after a very interesting second keynote by VMware CTO Stephen Herrod, delving a bit deeper into the actual changes being pushed into different levels of the software. At this point, the amount of information available might actually fill up an entire article, but alas, time constraints force me to keep this short.
First and foremost, Herrod talked about the performance leaps that have been made over the past year, stressing the importance of moving every aspect of the data center into the cloud, to fully utilize its possibilities. He quoted performance studies using both a heavy OLTP database (using Oracle) and SPEC's very own SPECweb2005 bench to prove that performance hits are quickly becoming a non-issue (weren't they saying this last year as well, though?). Oracle was claimed to run at 24000 transactions per second, while the webserver was able to maintain up to 3 billion pageviews a day. Not too shabby compared to Ebay's average of 1 billion pageviews. The image below displays Oracle's virtual performance when using 1, 2, 4 and 8 vCPU's. The green bar is its native performance on an 8-core machine, VMware claims the performance...
February 25, 2009, 7 comments
blog post by Johan De Gelas
The Istanbul cores are the same as those that can be found in the AMD's latest Shanghai CPU. But the "uncore" part of Istanbul is more interesting. By now, you have probably heard about AMD's "HT-assist" technology, a probe or snoop filter. Every time a new cacheline is brought into the L3-cache of for example CPU 1 on the current Shanghai Platform, a broadcast message is sent to all L3-caches of all CPUs, and CPU 1 has to wait until those CPUs answer.
In the case of Istanbul, the CPU will simply check it's snoop filter in it's own L3-cache, and if none of the other CPUs have that certain cacheline, it can go ahead. This lowers the latency of bringing in a new cacheline and raises the effective bandwidth.
To better understand this, we combined our own stream benchmarking with the one that AMD presented. All AMD systems are using DDR-2 800.
As each Stream thread works on its own data, there is no reason to send out coherency synchronization requests. These requests slow the process of getting new cachelines in the L3 and hence lower effective memory bandwidth. What is interesting is that this will not only benefit the...
February 25, 2009, 40 comments
blog post by Liz van Dijk
Seeming as how virtualization is a technology that is still expanding exponentially, and our research is not of the kind that drops a subject once the novelty has worn off, the Belgian IT department of Anandtech is once again attending VMworld Europe, with high hopes of greatly improving our knowledge on the vast amounts of fields virtualization has seeped into.
So here we are, once more in lovely Cannes, joining 4700 other attendees (up 200 from last year) at undoubtedly one of the best conference locations in Europe. And rather than trying to pour all the information into a big mega-article, we have decided to try some daily blogging as a way of channeling the content of the sessions to our readers.
As it is, the first breakout sessions started a mere 20 minutes ago, and we are excited to see what the day has to offer. As explained by VMware's CEO Paul Maritz in the keynote that kicked off the conference 2 hours ago, VMware's focus is shifting to completely changing the way data centers are structured. Of course, this is a process that was kicked off years ago with the release of server hypervisors in 2000, however, now that the technology...
February 24, 2009, 1 comments
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