Sizing Servers

De testresultaten geven ons een gedetailleerde analyse van de invloed van parameters zoals cache size en CPU load op de overall performance van ons storage systeem.

Wim De Wispelaere,

CEO bij Amplidata

New website!

After about a week of heavy experimenting, the new website is finally online!

"New website?", you say. "Seems like nothing's changed..."

Nothing is further from the truth however. Though our last website was created in Flash by a very talented Multimedia-intern, we chose to keep only the design, but recreate the entire system in a Drupal-based environment, making the site a lot easier to maintain.

At this point, we consider the website to be in beta, so it's possible some esthetic problems might pop up, though we'll try to work these out as soon as possible. Also, we are always open to suggestions, the new Commenting-function allows people to directly comment on our Blog-messages.

Blogged by: Liz van Dijk

14/10/2009 - 13:12

Comments posted: 1

What we learned at VMworld Europe 2009

After a bit of a hiatus in properly maintaining this site due to various maddening deadlines and the stress that comes with finding financing for the coming few years (we succeeded, by the way!), starting today, this site will be receiving weekly updates, so stay tuned!

As for today's update, it's time to share a bit of info on the things we learned at this year's VMworld Europe in Cannes. As we 4-manned the event, we were able to attend quite a large amount of sessions. A full-sized article on that is coming up on Anandtech, but for our own website, we'll put up a couple of our notes to start out with:

Performance Best Practices (a session by Scott Drummonds)
We didn't learn quite as much as we'd hoped from this session, but its contents are nonetheless important considerations for anyone hoping to virtualize their data center. We'll list the most interesting pointers down here:

Any application that spends most of its time using the CPU and not much of anything else will barely feel the impact of virtualization. Performance is impacted primarily by applications that require a lot of time spent switching to kernelmode.
The highest measured network speed using ESX is 16Gb/s
ESX is able to handle at most about 100k IOPS and 600 disks in total.
Today's CPU's are much better equipped to handle virtualization than those of a few years ago. Consider upgrading for a very large performance boost.
The use of jumboframes is recommended for every NIC. Separate NICs should always be used for interserver communications within the data center, like VMotion.
Disk caching and properly distributed disks are an important factor for storage performance. The newest version of ESX will improve a lot on iSCSI performance.
VMware recommends always using VMFS with 64k boundaries. This is the standard setting in vCenter. If you are not using vCenter, remember to set it yourself.
Use an OS that causes less interrupts, and disable every device you don't need.
Enable large pages for the TLB, to reduce cache misses.
Applications that do not scale well on multicore platforms natively might do well in a multiple VM-deployment. This way, each app can perform at its most optimal setup.

If you're interested in learning more, stay tuned! We'll be updating this blog regularly with interesting tidbits of information.

Blogged by: Liz van Dijk

27/03/2009 - 16:44

Comments posted: 2

International expertise brought to Flemish SMB's

After four years of research and several publications which were read by up to 3 million people, the results of the sizing server lab has caught a lot of attention internationally. We had and have the pleasure of working with Intel's, Sun's and AMD's server performance team. Currently we are working closely together with VMWare and Microsoft to make sure that our report about virtualization is as accurate as possible.

But the funny thing is that very few IT people here in Flanders have heard about our work. That really has to change now that the Flemish goverment is funding our research, so we decided to organize a themeday on the subject of server virtualization. The objective is to really connect with the Flemish IT people. We'll talk about our findings, but we will also like hearing the experiences of other people. When you work hard in a lab, you tend to focus on a certain subject (in this case performance and HA) and you forget the other concerns.

Microsoft, VMWare and Novell are sending their best people, and besides the classic presentations, we decided also to give our public the possibility to fire off questions to all 3 of them at the same time. We hope that this will offer some really good insights on what is realy on the mind of the people who are working with virtualization every day rather than always hearing the opinion of those who are selling it.

I am hoping this themeday will help IT professionals here to understand what the pittfalls are. We will delve deep into the nuts and bolts, but more importantly point out how this affect your own applications. If you like our work, you can help us by pointing people to themeday.sizingservers.be .

Blogged by: Johan De Gelas

12/09/2008 - 16:48

Comments posted: 0