Quad Xeon 7500, the Best Virtualized Datacenter Building Block?
by Johan De Gelas on August 10, 2010 5:10 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
Conclusion
The first impression that the Xeon 7500 series made on the world was seriously blurred. Part of the reason is that the testing platform had a firmware bug that decreased the memory bandwidth by 20% and more. Another reason were the weird benchmarking choices of reviewers. Lightwave, folding@home and Cinebench were somehow popular measuring sticks portraying the Xeon X7560 as the more expensive and at the same time slower brother of the Xeon X5670. That kind of software is run mostly on sub $4000 workstations and cheap 1U server farms, and we seriously doubt that anyone in their right mind would spend $30,000 on a server to run these kind of workloads.
Our own benchmarking was not complete either, as our virtualization benchmarking fell short of giving 32—let alone 64—threads enough work. Still, the impressive SAP S&D benchmark numbers, one of the most reliable and most relevant industry standard benchmarks out there, made it clear to us that we should give the Xeon X7560 another chance to prove itself.
Our new virtualization benchmark vApus Mark II shows that we should give credit where it is due: servers based on the X7560 are really impressive when consolidating services using virtualization: a quad Xeon X7560 can offer 2.3 times better performance than the best dual socket systems today! You might even call the performance numbers historical: for the first time in history, Intel’s multi-socket servers run circles around the dual socket servers. Remember how the quad Xeon 7200 hardly outperformed the dual Xeon 5300 at the end of 2006, and how the quad 7400 was humiliated by the dual Xeon X5500 in 2009? And even if we go even further back in history, the Xeon MP never outperformed the dual socket offerings by a large margin. Memory capacity and RAS features were almost always the main selling points. For the first time, scalability is more than just a hollow phrase; a Xeon X7560 server can replace two or more smaller servers in terms of memory capacity and processing power.
The end result is that these servers can be attractive for people who are not the traditional high-end server buyers. Using a few quad Xeon X7560 servers instead of a lot of dual socket servers to consolidate your software services may turn out to be a very healthy strategy. Based on our current data, two quad Xeon X7560 ($65k- $70k) are worth about five Xeon 5600 servers ($50k-$65k). The acquisitions costs are slightly higher, but you need fewer physical servers and that lowers the management costs somewhat. There are two questions that remain:
1) How bad or good is the power/performance ratio?
2) If RAS is not your top priority, does a quad Opteron 6174 make more sense?
A Dell R815 with four twelve-core Opteron 6174 processors has arrived in our labs. So our search for the best virtualization building block continues.
A big thanks to Tijl Deneut and Dieter Vandroemme.
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davegraham - Wednesday, August 11, 2010 - link
which is actually why you should be using a Cisco C460 for this type of test.dave
MySchizoBuddy - Wednesday, August 11, 2010 - link
Is there an exact correlation with number of cores and VMs. How many VMs can a 48 core system support.Let's assume you want 100 systems virtualized. What's the minimum number of cores that will handle those 100 VMs.
dilidolo - Wednesday, August 11, 2010 - link
Depends on how many vCPU and memory you assign to each VM and how much physical memory your server has. CPU is rarely the bottleneck , memory and storage are.Then not all the VMs have the same workload. So no one can really answer your question.
davegraham - Wednesday, August 11, 2010 - link
was going to say that a small amount of memory oversubscription is "ok" depending on the workload but you'd want that buffered with something a little more powerful than spinning disk (SSD, for example).tech6 - Wednesday, August 11, 2010 - link
The parameters for determining the optimal configuration for VMWare go well beyond just which CPU is faster. I like the AT stories about server tech but there need to be broader considerations of server features.1. Many applications are memory limited and not CPU bound so the memory flexibility may trump CPU power. That is why 256Gb with a dual 75xx or 6xxx series CPU in an 810 may well be the better choice than either a quad socket or dual socket 56xx configuration.
2. Software licensing is a big part of choosing the server as it is often licensed per socket. Sometime more cores and more memory is cheaper than more sockets.
3. Memory reliability is another major issue. Large amounts of plain ECC memory will most likely result in problems 2-3 years after deployment. The platforms available with the 6xxx and 75xx series CPUs support memory reliability features that often make it a better choice for VM data centers.
4. Power and density is another major issue which drive data center costs that must be given consideration when reviewing servers.
don_k - Wednesday, August 11, 2010 - link
Would like to see some non-windows VM benchmarks as well as a different virtualisation application used and by extension an SQL server that does not come from microsoft. Also would like to see benchmarks on para-virtualised VMs along with full hardware virtualised VMs.The review as is is quite meaningless to anyone that does not run windows VMs and/or does not use VMware.
You do have oracle on a windows VM so maybe oracle on a solaris/bsd VM as well as oracle on a linux para-virtualised guest.
There is also no mention of how, if at all, the VMs were optimised for the workloads they are running. In particular and most importantly how are the DBs using the disks? Where is the data and where are the logs? How are the disks passed on to the VM (local file, separate partition, virtual volume, full access to one/more drives etc etc).
Way too many variables to make any kind of an accurate conclusion in my opinion.
phoenix79 - Wednesday, August 11, 2010 - link
I'm curious as to why you didn't include a quad-socket Magny-Cours system. I would have been very interested to see how it would have stacked up in this article.Stuka87 - Wednesday, August 11, 2010 - link
Ditto, I would like to see the best from each CPU maker. To really see which has the best price:performance ratio.davegraham - Wednesday, August 11, 2010 - link
if vApus II was available i could run it on my Magny-Cours.dave
JohanAnandtech - Thursday, August 12, 2010 - link
The Dell R815 and quad MC deserve an article on their own.