Infrastructure as a Service: Benchmarking Cloud Computing
by Johan De Gelas on June 2, 2011 8:50 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- IT Computing general
- Cloud Computing
vApus Mark II
vApus Mark II is our newest benchmark suite that tests how well servers cope with virtualizing "heavy duty" applications; we've previously explained the benchmark methodology. However, we made a few changes to make this benchmark suitable for a cloud environment. The OLTP test, the freely available test "Calling Circle" of the Oracle Swingbench Suite, was not included. The OLTP test requires SSDs or a large amount of SAS drives and this would make it costly to run such a test on rented hardware. Thus, our scores are not directly comparable to other servers we have tested in the past, but the chart below uses the same test setup for all servers.
It is little surprise that our reference server is able to offer the best performance. We have four VMs requesting the power of 14 virtual CPUs, so the server has ample resources to satisfy this request. As a result, 14 physical cores of 2.26GHz are allocated, good for 31.6GHz of CPU power. This is our upper limit.
Next is the Terremark cluster in burst mode. We only reserved 10GHz, but the Terremark cluster is able to offer an extra 80% of CPU power on average. The result is that the Terremark cluster is able to offer about 70% of the throughput of the "in house" server. That is pretty good: we only pay for 10GHz most of the time and although the extra 80% comes at a premium cost, we only pay for the times where we actually need it.
Finally, let us compare the two similar setups, the "native server" with a 10GHz resource pool and the Terremark servers with a similar limitation. Once again, the Terremark virtual servers achieve about 70% of the throughput. That is not superb but it's not bad either. Even if Terremark ensures that every 10GHz of CPU power allocated is backed up with real physical processing power, the Terremark cluster has to manage more virtual machines and thus the overhead is higher than on our test machine that has to manage only our test virtual machines.
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benwilber - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
this is a joke, right?there is not one bit of useful information in this article. if i wanted to read a Terremark brochure, i'd call our sales rep.
speaking as an avid reader for more than 12 years, it's my opinion that all these braindead IT virtualization articles are poorly conceived and not worthy of anandtech.
krazyderek - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
submit a better one thenDigitalFreak - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
I guess it's a good thing then that your opinion doesn't matter.HMTK - Monday, June 6, 2011 - link
Yeah, I also prefer yet another vidcard benchmark fest.Not.
Shadowmaster625 - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
Still waiting for that $100 tablet that can provide me a remote desktop that is so responsive you cant even tell it is a remote desktop. I want it to be able to stream video at 480p. With good compression, this only requires a 1 mbps connection. I dont think this is too much to ask for $100. I dont care that much about HD. Streaming a desktop at 30 fps should only require a small fraction of my bandwidth.tech6 - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
As you mentioned, Terremark cloud benchmarks vary greatly depending on the underlying hardware. We did some tests on their Miami cloud last year and found the old AMD infrastructure to be a disappointing performer. The software is very clever but, like all clouds, some benchmarking and asking the right questions is essential before making a choice.duploxxx - Sunday, June 5, 2011 - link
as usual this is very debatable information you provide. How did you bench and what storage platform? what is your compare a 2008 vs 2010? What kind of application did you bench? Specint? :) Just like Anandtech has greatly shown in the past is that appplications performance can be influenced by the type of cpu (look at the web results within the vApp that is clearly showing it likes faster cache architecture and to certain extend influences the final vApp result to much) you need to look at the whole environment and applications running in the environment, this requires decent tools to benchmark your total platform. (We have more code written by dev to automaticaly test any functional and performance aspect then the applications by themselves) everything in a virtual layer can influence the final performance.Our company has from 2005 till now always verified the platforms between intel and AMD on virtualization every 2 and 4 socket machine. Currently approx 3000 AMD servers on line all on Vmware private clusters from many generations. They are doing more then fine. The only timeframe that the Intel was faster and a better choice was just at launch time of the Nehalem Xeon for a few months. Offcourse one also need to look at the usecase for example the latest Xeon EX is very interesting with huge amount of small vm's, but requires way more infrastructure to handle for example load and the failure of a server. (Not to mention license cost from some 3th party vendors like Oracle.....)
lenghui - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
A very well thought-out comparison betwen the in-house and IaaS environments. Even those who have the in-house resources would need to spend a lot of research time to reach a conclusion. In that sense, your review is most invaluable -- saving hundreds of hours or otherwise guess work for your readers. You probably can include a price analysis as the other readers have suggested.Thanks, Johan, for the great article.
brian2p98 - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
This is, imo, the biggest unknown with cloud computing--and the most critical. Poor performance here could result in degradation of performance on the scale of several orders of magnitude. Website hosting, otoh, is rather straightforward. Who cares if 5Ghz of cloud cpu power is equivalent to only 1Ghz of local, so long as buying 25Ghz still makes economic sense?duploxxx - Sunday, June 5, 2011 - link
depends on how good or bad your app can scale with cpu cores.....if it doesn't and you need more vm's to handle the same load you also need other systems to spread the load between apps.