Server Clash: DELL's Quad Opteron DELL R815 vs HP's DL380 G7 and SGI's Altix UV10
by Johan De Gelas on September 9, 2010 7:30 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- AMD
- Intel
- Xeon
- Opteron
VMWare's VMmark
Before we take a look at our own virtualization benchmarking, let us look at the currently (end of August 2010) available VMmark scores.
According to VMmark, the quad Xeon 7560 is about 25% faster than the quad Opteron 6174. VMmark gives a rough idea, but only a rough one. We already wrote down our doubts about VMmark, but here comes another one. The score of 75.34 is achieved with 300 VMs (50 tiles) and 512GB of RAM. That means that each physical Xeon 7500 core is shared by 9.4 VMs ! Now to be honest, this is not the real problem as quite a few servers out there have lots of virtual CPUs mapped onto one CPU. The problem is that VMmark scores use throughput, so the OEM benchmarking experts are completely focusing on throughput and not response times. The result of this is that you get very low (slow), possibly even unacceptable, performance per VM.
Let us make this clearer. If you look at the first pages of the VMmark result disclosure of the Dell R815 or Dell R910, you’ll see that the geometric mean score of one tile is around 1.5 (look at the number at the far right). To refresh your memory, a tile consist of 5 active and one idle workload:
- MS Exchange (2 CPUs)
- SpecJBB (Java Server, 2 CPUs)
- Apache web server VM (2 CPUs)
- MySQL database VM (2 CPUs)
- SAMBA file server VM (1 CPU)
- Idle VM
If one tile gets a score of 1.5, it means that it is 50% faster than the reference system which ran only one tile. However, the reference system was an old HP Proliant DL580 G2. This system contained two 2.2GHz single-core Intel Xeon CPUs with Hyper-Threading support, and had 16GB of memory. That is a 130nm Xeon “Galatin”, a CPU very similar to the Pentium 4 “Northwood” Desktop CPU. This is a pretty old Xeon: it was introduced in March 2004. Galatin had a 512KB L2 cache like “Northwood”, but a 2MB L3 cache was added to improve scalability, as this was a Xeon MP processor made for quad socket configurations.
Now Galatin was a pretty decent CPU when it came out, but this CPU was not made nor suitable for a virtualizated consolidation scenario. It had no hardware virtualization whatsoever, and the VM Exit and Entry overhead was no less than six times (and more!) worse than on the Xeon “Nehalem”. You can imagine that running five applications on two of those single core CPUs is not exactly a speedy experience. The file server achieved a "blazing 10MB/s" and the website (the e-commerce website of SPECweb2005) could keep up with about 17 hits per second. Now achieving 50% more than that with an ultra modern system will not please many users. Imagine the surprise of tens of users that have to share a 15MB/s stream while they connect via their 1 gigabit Ethernet ports to the spanking new “state-of-the-art” server that has 10 Gbit Ethernet available.
So the trouble with VMmark is that the highest scores are only a measure of the total throughput; the throughput of the individual applications however is pretty miserable. It is not just a server that is running at 100%, it is a server that is completely overutilized. So the benchmark favors throughput to the extreme, which may well exaggerate differences between the competing systems.
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pablo906 - Saturday, September 11, 2010 - link
High performance Oracle environments are exactly what's being virtualized in the Server world yet it's one of your premier benchmarks./edit should read
High performance Oracle environments are exactly what's not being virtualized in the Server world yet it's one of your premier benchmarks.
JohanAnandtech - Monday, September 13, 2010 - link
"You run highly loaded Hypervisors. NOONE does this in the Enterprise space."I agree. Isn't that what I am saying on page 12:
"In the real world you do not run your virtualized servers at their maximum just to measure the potential performance. Neither do they run idle."
The only reason why we run with highly loaded hypervisors is to measure the peak throughput of the platform. Like VMmark. We know that is not realworld, and does not give you a complete picture. That is exactly the reason why there is a page 12 and 13 in this article. Did you miss those?
Per Hansson - Sunday, September 12, 2010 - link
Hi, please use a better camera for pictures of servers that costs thousands of dollarsIn full size the pictures look terrible, way too much grain
The camera you use is a prime example of how far marketing have managed to take these things
10MP on a sensor that is 1/2.3 " (6.16 x 4.62 mm, 0.28 cm²)
A used DSLR with a decent 50mm prime lens plus a tripod really does not cost that much for a site like this
I love server pron pictures :D
dodge776 - Friday, September 17, 2010 - link
I may be one of the many "silent" readers of your reviews Johan, but putting aside all the nasty or not-so-bright comments, I would like to commend you and the AT team for putting up such excellent reviews, and also for using industry-standard benchmarks like SAPS to measure throughput of the x86 servers.Great work and looking forward to more of these types of reviews!
lonnys - Monday, September 20, 2010 - link
Johan -You note for the R815:
Make sure you populate at least 32 DIMMs, as bandwidth takes a dive at lower DIMM counts.
Could you elaborate on this? We have a R815 with 16x2GB and not seeing the expected performance for our very CPU intensive app perhaps adding another 16x2GB might help
JohanAnandtech - Tuesday, September 21, 2010 - link
This comment you quoted was written in the summary of the quad Xeon box.16 DIMMs is enough for the R815 on the condition that you have one DIMM in each channel. Maybe you are placing the DIMMs wrongly? (Two DIMMs in one channel, zero DIMM in the other?)
anon1234 - Sunday, October 24, 2010 - link
I've been looking around for some results comparing maxed-out servers but I am not finding any.The Xeon 5600 platform clocks the memory down to 800MHz whenever 3 dimms per channel are used, and I believe in some/all cases the full 1066/1333MHz speed (depends on model) is only available when 1 dimm per channel is used. This could be huge compared with an AMD 6100 solution at 1333MHz all the time, or a Xeon 7560 system at 1066 all the time (although some vendors clock down to 978MHz with some systems - IBM HX5 for example). I don't know if this makes a real-world difference on typical virtualization workloads, but it's hard to say because the reviewers rarely try it.
It does make me wonder about your 15-dimm 5600 system, 3 dimms per channel @800MHz on one processor with 2 DPC @ full speed on the other. Would it have done even better with a balanced memory config?
I realize you're trying to compare like to like, but if you're going to present price/performance and power/performance ratios you might want to consider how these numbers are affected if I have to use slower 16GB dimms to get the memory density I want, or if I have to buy 2x as many VMware licenses or Windows Datacenter processor licenses because I've purchased 2x as many 5600-series machines.
nightowl - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 - link
The previous post is correct in that the Xeon 5600 memory configuration is flawed. You are running the processor in a degraded state 1 due to the unbalanced memory configuration as well as the differing memory speeds.The Xeon 5600 processors can run at 1333MHz (with the correct DIMMs) with up to 4 ranks per channel. Going above this results in the memory speed clocking down to 800MHz which does result in a performance drop to the applications being run.
markabs - Friday, June 8, 2012 - link
Hi there,I know this is an old post but I'm looking at putting 4 SSDs in a Dell poweredge and had a question for you.
What raid card did you use with the above setup?
Currently a new Dell poweredge R510 comes with a PERC H700 raid card with 1GB cache and this is connect to a hot swap chassis. Dell want £1500 per SSD (crazy!) so I'm looking to buy 4 intel 520s and setup them up in raid 10.
I just wanted to know what raid card you used and if you had a trouble with it and what raid setup you used?
many thanks.
Mark
ian182 - Thursday, June 28, 2012 - link
I recently bought a G7 from www.itinstock.com and if I am honest it is perfect for my needs, i don't see the point in the higher end ones when it just works out a lot cheaper to buy the parts you need and add them to the G7.