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
Heavy Virtualization Benchmarking
All tests run on ESX 3.5 Update 4 (Build 153875), which has support for AMD's RVI. It also supports the Intel Xeon X55xx Nehalem but has no support yet for EPT.
Getting one score out of a virtualized machine is not straightforward: you cannot add up URL/s, transactions per second, and queries per second. If virtualized system A turns out twice as many web responses but fails to deliver half of the transactions machine B delivers, which one is the fastest? Luckily for us, Intel (vConsolidate) and VMware (VMmark) have already solved this problem. We use a very similar approach. First, we test each application on its native operating system with four physical cores. Those four physical cores belong to one Opteron Shanghai 8389 2.9GHz. This becomes our reference score.
| Opteron Shanghai 8389 2.9GHz Reference System | |
| Test | Reference score |
| OLAP - Nieuws.be | 175.3 Queries /s |
| Web portal - MCS | 45.8 URL/s |
| OLTP - Calling Circle | 155.3 Transactions/s |
We then divide the score of the first VM by the "native" score. In other words, divide the number of queries per second in the first OLAP VM by the number of queries that one Opteron 8389 2.9GHz gets when it is running the Nieuws.be OLAP Database.
| Performance Relative to Reference System | ||||
| Server System Processors | OLAP VM | Web portal VM 2 | Web portal VM 3 | OLTP VM |
| Dual Xeon X5570 2.93 | 94% | 50% | 51% | 59% |
| Dual Xeon X5570 2.93 HT off | 92% | 43% | 43% | 43% |
| Dual Xeon E5450 3.0 | 82% | 36% | 36% | 45% |
| Dual Xeon X5365 3.0 | 79% | 35% | 35% | 32% |
| Dual Xeon L5350 1.86 | 54% | 24% | 24% | 20% |
| Dual Xeon 5080 3.73 | 47% | 12% | 12% | 7% |
| Dual Opteron 8389 2.9 | 85% | 39% | 39% | 51% |
| Dual Opteron 2222 3.0 | 50% | 17% | 17% | 12% |
So for example, the OLAP VM on the dual Opteron 8389 got a score of 85% of that of the same application running on one Opteron 8389. As you can see the web portal server only has 39% of the performance of a native machine. This does not mean that the hypervisor is inefficient, however. Don't forget that we gave each VM four virtual CPUs and that we have only eight physical CPUs. If the CPUs are perfectly isolated and there was no hypervisor, we would expect that each VM gets 2 physical CPUs or about 50% of our reference system. What you see is that OLAP VM and OLTP VM "steal" a bit of performance away from the web portal VMs.
Of course, the above table is not very user-friendly. To calculate one vApus Mark I score per physical server we take the geometric mean of all those percentages, and as we want to understand how much work the machine has done, we multiply it by 4. There is a reason why we take the geometric mean and not the arithmetic mean. The geometric mean penalizes systems that score well on one VM and very badly on another VM. Peaks and lows are not as desirable as a good steady increase in performance over all virtual machines, and the geometric mean expresses this. Let's look at the results.
After seeing so many VMmark scores, the result of vApus Mark I really surprised us. The Nehalem based Xeons are still the fastest servers, but do not crush the competition as we have witnessed in VMmark and VConsolidate. Just to refresh your memory, here's a quick comparison:
| VMmark vs. vApus Mark I Summary | ||
| Comparison | VMmark | vApus Mark I |
| Xeon X5570 2.93 vs. Xeon 5450 3.0 | 133-184% faster (*) | 31% faster |
| Xeon X5570 2.93 vs. Opteron 8389 2.9 | +/- 100% faster (*)(**) | 21% faster |
| Opteron 8389 2.9 vs. Xeon 5450 3.0 | +/- 42% | 9% faster |
(*) Xeon X5570 results are measured on ESX 4.0; the others are on ESX 3.5.
(**) Xeon X5570 best score is 108% faster than Opteron at 2.7GHz. We have extrapolated the 2.7GHz scores to get the 2.9GHz ones.
Our first virtualization benchmark disagrees strongly with the perception that the large OEMs and recent press releases have created with the VMmark scores. "Xeon 54xx and anything older are hopelessly outdated virtualization platforms, and the Xeon X55xx make any other virtualization platform including the latest Opteron 'Shanghai' look silly". That is the impression you get when you quickly glance over the VMmark scores.
However, vApus Mark I tells you that you should not pull your older Xeons and newer Opterons out of your rack just yet if you are planning to continue to run your VMs on ESX 3.5. This does not mean that either vApus Mark I or VMmark is wrong, as they are very different benchmarks, and vApus Mark I was run exclusively on ESX 3.5 update 4 while some of the VMmark scores have been run on vSphere 4.0. What it does show us how important it is to have a second data point and a second independent "opinion". That said, the results are still weird. In vApus Mark I, Nehalem is no longer the ultimate, far superior virtualization platform; at the same time, the Shanghai Opteron does not run any circles around the Xeon 54xx. There is so much to discuss that a few lines will not do the job. Let's break things up a bit more.
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tshen83 - Thursday, May 21, 2009 - link
Jarred:Let's not fool each other. Johan's AMD bias is disgusting.
My assertion that HardOCP killed the GPU market is simply trying to show you the effect of invalidating industry standard benchmarks. Architecturally, Nvidia's GPU bigger monolithic cores are far more advanced than ATI's cores right now. In GPGPU applications, it is not even close. The problem with gaming FPS benchmark as I have said is that developers are typically happy once the FPS reaches parity. It does not show architectural superiority.
vApus? There are a ton of questions unanswered.
1. Who wrote the software?(I assume European)
2. Does the software scale linearly? And does the software scale on both AMD and Intel architecuture?
3. Why benchmark 4 Core Virtual machines when we know that VMware doesn't really scale that well themselves in SMP setup?
4. Seriously? Nieuws.be OLAP database? How many real world people run Nieuws.be?
I usually don't respond to Anandtech articles unless the article is disgustingly stupid. I also don't understand why you guys can't accept the fact that Nehalem is in fact 100% performance/watt improved vs the previous generation Xeon. It is backed by data from more than one industry standard benchmark.
Is AMD worth a look today? No, absolutely not. If you are still considering anything AMD today, you are an idiot. (The world is full of idiots) AMD's only chance is if they can release the G34 socket platform within a TDP range that is acceptable before they run out of cash.
Before you call me a troll, remind yourself this: usually the troll is smarter than the people he/she is trolling. So ask yourself this question: did Johan deserve the negative critism?
JarredWalton - Thursday, May 21, 2009 - link
You criticize every one of his articles, often because I'm not sure your reading comprehension is up to snuff. His "AMD bias" is not disgusting, though I'm quite sure your Intel bias is far worse than his AMD bias. The reason 3DMark has been largely invalidated is that it doesn't show realistic performance - though some of the latest versions scale similarly to some games, at best 3DMark measures 3DMark performance. Similarly, VMmark measures VMmark performance. Unless your workload is the same as VMmark, it doesn't really tell you much.1 - Who wrote the software? According to the article, "vApus or Virtual Application Unique Stresstest is a stress test developed by Dieter Vandroemme, lead developer of the Sizing Server Lab at the University College of West-Flanders." His being European has nothing to do with anything at all, unless you're a racist, bigoted fool.
2 - 2-tile and 3-tile testing is in the works. It will take time.
3 - Perhaps because there are companies looking for exactly that sort of solution. I guess we should only test situations where VMware performs optimally?
4 - The source of the database is not so critical as the fact that it is a real-world database. Whether Johan uses a DB from Nieuws.be, AnandTech.com, Cnet.com, or some other source isn't particularly meaningful. It is a real setup used outside of benchmarking, and he had access to the site.
I usually don't respond to trolls unless they are disgustingly stupid as well. I don't understand why you can't accept the fact that Nehalem isn't a panacea that fixes all the world's woes. That is backed by the world around us which continues to have all sorts of problems, and a "greener" CPU isn't going to save the environment any more than unplugging millions of cell phone charges that each consume 0.5W of power or less.
AMD is certainly worth a *look* today. Will you actually end up purchasing AMD? That depends largely on your intended use. I have old Athlon 64/X2 systems that do everything that they need to do. For a small investment, you can build a much better AMD HTPC than Intel - mostly because the cheap Intel platform boards are garbage. I'd take a lesser CPU with a better motherboard any day over a top-end CPU with a crappy motherboard. If you want a system for less than $300, the motherboards alone would make me tend towards AMD.
Of course, that completely misses the point that this isn't even remotely related to that market. Servers are in another realm, and features and support are critical. If you have a choice between AMD quad socket and Intel dual socket, and the price is the same, you might want the AMD solution. If you have existing hardware that can be upgraded to Shanghai without changing anything other than the CPU, you might want AMD. If you're buying new, you'd want to look at as much data as possible.
Xeon X5570 still surpasses AMD in the initial tests by over 30%, which is not insignificant. If that extends to 50% or more in 2-tile and 3-tile setups, it's even more in Intel's favor. However, a 30% advantage is hardly out of line with the rest of the computing world. SYSmark 2007 shows the i7 965 beating the Phenom II 955 by 26.6%. Photoshop CS4 shows a 48.7% difference. DivX is 35.3%, xVid is 15.9% pass1 and 65.4% pass2, and WME9 is 25%. 3dsmax is 55.8%, CINEBENCH is 42%, and POV-ray is 65.3%.
Which of those tests is a best indication of true potential for Core i7? Well, ALL OF THEM ARE! What's the best virtualization performance metric out there? Or the best server benchmark out there? They're ALL important and useful. vApus is just one more item to look at, and it still shows a good lead for Intel.
Where is the 100% perf/watt boost compared to last generation? Well, it's in an application where i7 can stretch its eight threaded muscles. Compared to AMD, the performance/watt benefit for an entire system is more like 40% on servers. For QX9770, i7 965 is 32% more perf/watt in Cinebench, or 37.6% in Xvid. I doubt you can find a 100% increase in performance/watt without cherry-picking the benchmark and CPUs in question, but that's what you're already determined to do. That, my friend, is true bias - when you can't even admit that anything from the competition might be noteworthy, you are obviously wearing blinders.
Zstream - Thursday, May 21, 2009 - link
Umm based on your two rants this means you have ZERO knowledge working with virtual desktops/terminal servers/virtual applications.I feel I need to make two corrections.
One: ATI's die size is roughly 75% of Nvidia's, how do you conclude that Nvidia is better? Well honestly you can not because if you scale the performance and had the same die size of Nvidia, then ATI would be killing them.
Second: Majority of enterprise's run AMD and Intel, in fact not till Neh. did Intel really come into the virtualization market.
tshen83 - Thursday, May 21, 2009 - link
"Umm based on your two rants this means you have ZERO knowledge working with virtual desktops/terminal servers/virtual applications. "Really? Just how did you come up with this revelation?
"One: ATI's die size is roughly 75% of Nvidia's, how do you conclude that Nvidia is better? Well honestly you can not because if you scale the performance and had the same die size of Nvidia, then ATI would be killing them. "
You don't know shit about GPUs.
"Second: Majority of enterprise's run AMD and Intel, in fact not till Neh. did Intel really come into the virtualization market. "
True. That's what I am saying too, if you listened. I said, "no one should be considering AMD today because Nehalem is here".
Zstream - Thursday, May 21, 2009 - link
I came to that conclusion based on your incoherent rants.Why would you say I do not know shit about GPU's? I provided you a fact, your illogical thinking does not change the matter. It comes down to die size and ATI wins performance/DIE. If you would like to argue that claim with then please do so.
Who would consider Neh in todays market? Very few, unless you are a self proclaimed millionaire who crazily spends or needing the extra performance boost in some applications like exchange.
Viditor - Thursday, May 21, 2009 - link
Guys, it's tshen...nobody over the age of 12 listens to his rants anyway, so don't feed the troll (or ban him if you can...).leexgx - Thursday, May 21, 2009 - link
LOL nice rant3dmark cant be used any more as its not an 3dmark any more its more like an 3d gpu/cpu mark the CPU can sway the total result
AMD cpus have been using dedicated bus that talks to each other cpu socket and has direct access to the ram, allso AMD does have V-amd as well on all amd64 am2 cpus as well as optrons an (baring sempron)
Makaveli - Thursday, May 21, 2009 - link
Ya what is the post all about.HardOCP killed the GPU market? I don't know about you but I never bought a videocard because of its 3dmark score. It's one benchmark that both companies cater to but is of little importance. Hardocp review method has much more valuable data for me than one benchmark.
Let me ask you this when you are buying a car or anything of siginicant value. Do you not do your homework is one review being either positive or negative enough to drop your hard earned cash?
If so Bestbuy is that way!
As for the rest of your post the personal attacks and childish language cleary show your not even worth taking seriously. Sounds more like the ramblings of a Highschool child who is trying to get attention.
Good day to you sir,
Godspeed
Zstream - Thursday, May 21, 2009 - link
You have no idea what you are talking about. The benchmark software can be downloaded. It is not our fault you are to poor to pay for a product.The rest I have to say "LOL".
DeepThought86 - Thursday, May 21, 2009 - link
Wow, just wow.