Introduction
We just published the largest SPECweb2005 score to date on a 16 core server. The benchmark was run on an HP ProLiant DL585 G5 with four Quad-Core AMD 8382 OpteronTM processors. This record score of 44,000 includes an Ecommerce component demonstrating 69,525 concurrent connections. In the Support component, this single-host workload drove network throughput on the server to just under 16 Gb/s.
This once again proves the capabilities of the VI3 platform and its ability to service workloads with stringent Quality of Service (QoS) requirements along with a large storage and networking footprint. With continuous advancements in virtualization technology (such as hardware assist for MMU virtualization and NetQueue support for 10 Gigabit Ethernet) performance with the VI3 platform can meet the needs of the most demanding, high traffic web sites.
While record-setting performance of web servers proves the capabilities of ESX, the real story of web server virtualization is the gains due to web farm consolidation and improved flexibility. Infrastructure serving as the web front end today is designed around hundreds or even thousands of often underutilized two and four core servers. Consolidation of these servers onto modern systems with multi-core CPUs reduces costs, simplifies management and eases power and cooling demands. Consolidating web servers makes business sense. This SPECweb2005 result from VMware has shown that the ESX Server can handle loads much more extreme than anticipated in such a consolidated environment.
The Benchmark
The SPECweb2005 benchmark consists of three workloads: Banking, Ecommerce, and Support, each with different workload characteristics representing common use cases for web servers. Each workload measures the number of simultaneous user sessions a web server can support while still meeting stringent quality-of-service and error-rate requirements. The aggregate metric reported by the SPECweb2005 benchmark is a normalized metric based on the performance scores obtained on all three workloads.
|
Component |
Score |
Explanation |
|
Banking |
80,000 |
Models online banking. Represents number of customers accessing accounts at a given time that can be supported with acceptable QoS |
|
E-commerce |
69,525 |
Models online retail store. 69,525 is only 75 shy of the highest number reported, which required 50% more processing cores. |
|
Support |
33,000 |
Represents users acquiring patches and downloads from a support web site. In this test network throughput was 16Gb/s. |
|
SPECweb2005 Score |
44,000 |
Normalized metric from the three components. |
Table 1.Results in SPECweb2005 submission.
Benchmark Configuration
|
Hardware |
HP ProLiant DL585 G5 with four Quad-Core AMD 8382 OpteronTM processors, 128 GB RAM. |
|
Disk subsystem |
Two EMC CLARiiON CX3-40 Fibre Channel SAN arrays, total of 110 * 133GB (15K RPM) spindles |
|
Network |
Four Intel 10 Gigabit XF SR Server Adapters |
|
Hypervisor |
ESX Server 3.5 U3 |
|
Guest Operating system |
RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 Update 1 |
|
Virtual hardware |
1 vCPU, 8 GB memory, vmxnet virtual network adapter |
|
Web Server Software |
Rock Web Server v1.4.7, Rock JSP/Servlet Container v1.3.2 |
|
Client Systems |
30 * Dell Poweredge 1950, Dual-socket Dual-core Intel Xeon, 8 GB |
|
Workload |
SPECweb2005 |
Table 2.Benchmark Configuration.
Performance Details
Here’s a quick look at what was accomplished with a single ESX host using SPECweb2005 workload.
Aggregate performance: The aggregate SPECweb2005 performance of 44,000 obtained on our 16-core virtual configuration is higher than any result ever recorded on a 16-core native system.
Support performance: The support workload is the most I/O intensive of all the workloads. The file-set data used for the support workload was laid out on a little over 100 spindles and consisted of files varying in size ranging from 100 KB to 36 MB. In our test configuration, we used fifteen virtual machines that shared the underlying physical 10Gbps NICs. Together they supported over 33,000 concurrent support user sessions, and handled close to sixteen Gigabits per second web traffic on a single ESX host.
Banking performance: This workload emulates online banking that transfers encrypted information using HTTPS. The file-set data used for the banking test was about 1.3 terabytes consisting of some eight million individual files of varied sizes. We laid out all this data in a single VMFS volume that spanned multiple LUNs. We used fifteen virtual machines that shared the same base image. Together, they supported 80,000 concurrent banking user sessions and handled 143,000 HTTP operations/second.
Ecommerce performance: Of the three workloads, Ecommerce workload probably fits the profile of most customers. This is because unlike Banking, and Support workloads, this workload is a mixture of HTTP and HTTPS requests. The I/O characteristics fall in between Banking and Support workloads. In our test, ESX supported 69,525 concurrent Ecommerce user sessions on a 16-core server. Our result is the second highest E-commerce result ever published, which has only been bested by only another 75 sessions on a system with 50% more cores.
To learn more about the test configuration and tuning descriptions, please see the full disclosure report on the official SPEC website: http://www.spec.org/osg/web2005.