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Docker Containers Performance in VMware vSphere

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by Qasim Ali, Banit Agrawal, and Davide Bergamasco

“Containers without compromise.” This was one of the key messages at VMworld 2014 USA in San Francisco. It was presented in the opening keynote, and then the advantages of running Docker containers inside of virtual machines were discussed in detail in several breakout sessions. These include security/isolation guarantees and also the existing rich set of management functionalities. But some may say, “These benefits don’t come for free: what about the performance overhead of running containers in a VM?”

A recent report compared the performance of a Docker container to a KVM VM and showed very poor performance in some micro-benchmarks and real-world use cases: up to 60% degradation. These results were somewhat surprising to those of us accustomed to near-native performance of virtual machines, so we set out to do similar experiments with VMware vSphere. Below, we present our findings of running Docker containers in a vSphere VM and  in a native configuration. Briefly,

  • We find that for most of these micro-benchmarks and Redis tests, vSphere delivered near-native performance with generally less than 5% overhead.
  • Running an application in a Docker container in a vSphere VM has very similar overhead of running containers on a native OS (directly on a physical server).

Next, we present the configuration and benchmark details as well as the performance results.

Deployment Scenarios

We compare four different scenarios as illustrated below:

  • Native: Linux OS running directly on hardware (Ubuntu, CentOS)
  • vSphere VM: Upcoming release of vSphere with the same guest OS as native
  • Native-Docker: Docker version 1.2 running on a native OS
  • VM-Docker: Docker version 1.2 running in guest VM on a vSphere host

In each configuration all the power management features are disabled in the BIOS and Ubuntu OS.

Figure 1. Different test scenarios

Benchmarks/Workloads

For this study, we used the micro-benchmarks listed below and also simulated a real-world use case.

Micro-benchmarks:

  • LINPACK: This benchmark solves a dense system of linear equations. For large problem sizes it has a large working set and does mostly floating point operations.
  • STREAM: This benchmark measures memory bandwidth across various configurations.
  • FIO: This benchmark is used for I/O benchmarking for block devices and file systems.
  • Netperf: This benchmark is used to measure network performance.

Real-world workload:

  • Redis: In this experiment, many clients perform continuous requests to the Redis server (key-value datastore).

For all of the tests, we run multiple iterations and report the average of multiple runs.

Performance Results

LINPACK

LINPACK solves a dense system of linear equations (Ax=b), measures the amount of time it takes to factor and solve the system of N equations, converts that time into a performance rate, and tests the results for accuracy. We used an optimized version of the LINPACK benchmark binary based on the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL).

  • Hardware: 4 socket Intel Xeon E5-4650 2.7GHz with 512GB RAM, 32 total cores, Hyper-Threading disabled
  • Software: Ubuntu 14.04.1 with Docker 1.2
  • VM configuration: 32 vCPU VM with 45K and 65K problem sizes

Figure 2. LINPACK performance for different test scenarios

We disabled HT for this run as recommended by the benchmark guidelines to get the best peak performance. For the 45K problem size, the benchmark consumed about 16GB memory. All memory was backed by transparent large pages. For VM results, large pages were used both in the guest (transparent large pages) and at the hypervisor level (default for vSphere hypervisor). There was 1-2% run-to-run variation for the 45K problem size. For 65K size, 33.8GB memory was consumed and there was less than 1% variation.

As shown in Figure 2, there is almost negligible virtualization overhead in the 45K problem size. For a bigger problem size, there is some inherent hardware virtualization overhead due to nested page table walk. This results in the 5% drop in performance observed in the VM case. There is no additional overhead of running the application in a Docker container in a VM compared to running the application directly in the VM.

STREAM

We used a NUMA-aware  STREAM benchmark, which is the classical STREAM benchmark extended to take advantage of NUMA systems. This benchmark measures the memory bandwidth across four different operations: Copy, Scale, Add, and Triad.

  • Hardware: 4 socket Intel Xeon E5-4650 2.7GHz with 512GB RAM, 32 total cores, HT enabled
  • Software: Ubuntu 14.04.1 with Docker 1.2
  • VM configuration: 64 vCPU VM (Hyper-Threading ON)

Figure 3. STREAM performance for different test scenarios

We used an array size of 2 billion, which used about 45GB of memory. We ran the benchmark with 64 threads both in the native and virtual cases. As shown in Figure 3, the VM added about 2-3% overhead across all four operations. The small 1-2% overhead of using a Docker container on a native platform is probably in the noise margin.

FIO

We used Flexible I/O (FIO) tool version 2.1.3 to compare the storage performance for the native and virtual configurations, with Docker containers running in both. We created a 10GB file in a 400GB local SSD drive and used direct I/O for all our tests so that there were no effects of buffer caching inside the OS. We used a 4k I/O size and tested three different I/O profiles: random 100% read, random 100% write, and a mixed case with random 70% read and 30% write. For the 100% random read and write tests, we selected 8 threads and an I/O depth of 16, whereas for the mixed test, we select an I/O depth of 32 and 8 threads. We use the taskset to set the CPU affinity on FIO threads in all configurations. All the details of the experimental setup are given below:

  • Hardware: 2 socket Intel Xeon E5-2660 2.2GHz with 392GB RAM, 16 total cores, Hyper-Threading enabled
  • Guest: 32-vCPU  14.04.1 Ubuntu 64-bit server with 256GB RAM, with a separate ext4 disk in the guest (on VMFS5 in vSphere run)
  • Benchmark:  FIO, Direct I/O, 10GB file
  • I/O Profile:  4k I/O, Random Read/Write: depth 16, jobs 8, Mixed: depth 32, jobs 8

Figure 4. FIO benchmark performance for different test scenarios

The figure above shows the normalized maximum IOPS achieved for different configurations and different I/O profiles. For random read in a VM, we see that there is about 2% reduction in maximum achievable IOPS when compared to the native case. However, for the random write and mixed tests, we observed almost the same performance (within the noise margin) compared to the native configuration.

Netperf

Netperf is used to measure throughput and latency of networking operations. All the details of the experimental setup are given below:

  • Hardware (Server): 4 socket Intel Xeon E5-4650 2.7GHz with 512GB RAM, 32 total cores, Hyper-Threading disabled
  • Hardware (Client): 2 socket Intel Xeon X5570 2.93GHz with 64GB RAM, 8 cores total, Hyper-Threading disabled
  • Networking hardware: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM57810
  • Software on server and Client: Ubuntu 14.04.1 with Docker 1.2
  • VM configuration: 2 vCPU VM with 4GB RAM

The server machine for Native is configured to have only 2 CPUs online for fair comparison with a 2-vCPU VM. The client machine is also configured to have 2 CPUs online to reduce variability. We tested four configurations: directly on the physical hardware (Native), in a Docker container (Native-Docker), in a virtual machine (VM), and in a Docker container inside a VM (VM-Docker). For the two Docker deployment scenarios, we also studied the effect of using host networking as opposed to the Docker bridge mode (default operating mode), resulting in two additional configurations (Native-Docker-HostNet and VM-Docker-HostNet) making total six configurations.

We used TCP_STREAM and TCP_RR tests to measure the throughput and round-trip network latency between the server machine and the client machine using a direct 10Gbps Ethernet link between two NICs. We used standard network tuning like TCP window scaling and setting socket buffer sizes for the throughput tests.

Figure 5. Netperf Recieve performance for different test scenarios

Figure 6. Netperf transmit performance for different test scenarios

Figures 5 and 6 show the unidirectional throughput over a single TCP connection with standard 1500 byte MTU for both transmit and receive TCP_STREAM cases (We used multiple Streams in VM-Docker* transmit case to reduce the variability in runs due to Docker bridge overhead and get predictable results). Throughput numbers for all configurations are identical and equal to the maximum possible 9.40Gbps on a 10GbE NIC.

Figure 7. Netperf TCP_RR performance for different test scenarios (Lower is better)

For the latency tests, we used the latency sensitivity feature introduced in vSphere5.5 and applied the best practices for tuning latency in a VM as mentioned in this white paper. As shown in Figure 7, latency in a VM with VMXNET3 device is only 15 microseconds more than in the native case because of the hypervisor networking stack. If users wish to reduce the latency even further for extremely latency- sensitive workloads, pass-through mode or SR-IOV can be configured to allow the guest VM to bypass the hypervisor network stack. This configuration can achieve similar round-trip latency to native, as shown in Figure 8. The Native-Docker and VM-Docker configuration adds about 9-10 microseconds of overhead due to the Docker bridge NAT function. A Docker container (running natively or in a VM) when configured to use host networking achieves similar latencies compared to the latencies observed when not running the workload in a container (native or a VM).

Figure 8. Netperf TCP_RR performance for different test scenarios (VMs in pass-through mode)

Redis

We also wanted to take a look at how Docker in a virtualized environment performs with real world applications. We chose Redis because: (1) it is a very popular application in the Docker space (based on the number of pulls of the Redis image from the official Docker registry); and (2) it is very demanding on several subsystems at once (CPU, memory, network), which makes it very effective as a whole system benchmark.

Our test-bed comprised two hosts connected by a 10GbE network. One of the hosts ran the Redis server in different configurations as mentioned in the netperf section. The other host ran the standard Redis benchmark program, redis-benchmark, in a VM.

The details about the hardware and software used in the experiments are the following:

  • Hardware: HP ProLiant DL380e Gen8 2 socket Intel Xeon E5-2470 2.3GHz with 96GB RAM, 16 total cores, Hyper-Threading enabled
  • Guest OS: CentOS 7
  • VM: 16 vCPU, 93GB RAM
  • Application: Redis 2.8.13
  • Benchmark: redis-benchmark, 1000 clients, pipeline: 1 request, operations: SET 1 Byte
  • Software configuration: Redis thread pinned to CPU 0 and network interrupts pinned to CPU 1

Since Redis is a single-threaded application, we decided to pin it to one of the CPUs and pin the network interrupts to an adjacent CPU in order to maximize cache locality and avoid cross-NUMA node memory access.  The workload we used consists of 1000 clients with a pipeline of 1 outstanding request setting a 1 byte value with a randomly generated key in a space of 100 billion keys.  This workload is highly stressful to the system resources because: (1) every operation results in a memory allocation; (2) the payload size is as small as it gets, resulting in very large number of small network packets; (3) as a consequence of (2), the frequency of operations is extremely high, resulting in complete saturation of the CPU running Redis and a high load on the CPU handling the network interrupts.

We ran five experiments for each of the above-mentioned configurations, and we measured the average throughput (operations per second) achieved during each run.  The results of these experiments are summarized in the following chart.

Figure 9. Redis performance for different test scenarios

The results are reported as a ratio with respect to native of the mean throughput over the 5 runs (error bars show the range of variability over those runs).

Redis running in a VM has slightly lower performance than on a native OS because of the network virtualization overhead introduced by the hypervisor. When Redis is run in a Docker container on native, the throughput is significantly lower than native because of the overhead introduced by the Docker bridge NAT function. In the VM-Docker case, the performance drop compared to the Native-Docker case is almost exactly the same small amount as in the VM-Native comparison, again because of the network virtualization overhead.  However, when Docker runs using host networking instead of its own internal bridge, near-native performance is observed for both the Docker on native hardware and Docker in VM cases, reaching 98% and 96% of the maximum throughput respectively.

Based on the above results, we can conclude that virtualization introduces only a 2% to 4% performance penalty.  This makes it possible to run applications like Redis in a Docker container inside a VM and retain all the virtualization advantages (security and performance isolation, management infrastructure, and more) while paying only a small price in terms of performance.

Summary

In this blog, we showed that in addition to the well-known security, isolation, and manageability advantages of virtualization, running an application in a Docker container in a vSphere VM adds very little performance overhead compared to running the application in a Docker container on a native OS. Furthermore, we found that a container in a VM delivers near native performance for Redis and most of the micro-benchmark tests we ran.

In this post, we focused on the performance of running a single instance of an application in a container, VM, or native OS. We are currently exploring scale-out applications and the performance implications of deploying them on various combinations of containers, VMs, and native operating systems.  The results will be covered in the next installment of this series. Stay tuned!

Custom Power Management Settings for Power Savings in vSphere 5.5

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VMware vSphere serves as a common virtualization platform for a diverse ecosystem of applications. Every application has different performance demands which must be met, but the power and cooling costs of running these applications are also a concern. vSphere’s default power management policy, “Balanced”, meets both of these goals by effectively preserving system performance while still saving some power.

For those who would like to prioritize energy efficiency even further, vSphere provides additional ways to tweak its power management under the covers. Custom power management settings in ESXi let you create your own power management policy, and your server’s BIOS also typically lets you customize hardware settings which can maximize power savings at a potential cost to performance.

When choosing a low power setting, we need to know whether it is effective at increasing energy efficiency, that is, the amount of work achieved for the power consumed. We also need to know how large of an impact the setting has on application throughput and latencies. A power saving setting that is too aggressive can result in low system performance. The best combination of power saving techniques will be highly individualized to your workload; here, we present one case study.

We used the VMmark virtualization benchmark to measure the effect of ESXi custom power settings and BIOS custom settings on energy efficiency and performance. VMmark 2.5 is a multi-host virtualization benchmark that uses diverse application workloads as well as common platform level workloads to model the demands of the datacenter. VMs running a complete set of the application workloads are grouped into units of load called tiles. For more details, see the VMmark 2.5 overview.

In this study, the best custom power setting produced an increase in energy efficiency of 17% with no significant drop in performance at moderate levels of load.

Test Methodology

All tests were conducted on a two-node cluster running VMware vSphere 5.5 U1. Each custom power management setting was tested independently to gauge its effects on energy efficiency and performance while all other settings were left at their defaults. The settings tested fall into two categories: ESXi custom power settings and BIOS custom settings. We discuss how to modify these settings at the end of the article.

Systems Under Test: Two Dell PowerEdge R720 servers
Configuration Per Server  
            CPUs: Two 12-core Intel® Xeon® E5-2697 v2 @ 2.7 GHz, Turbo Boost Enabled, up to 3.5 GHz, Hyper-Threading enabled
            Memory: 256GB ECC DDR3 @ 1866MHz
            Host Bus Adapter: QLogic ISP2532 Dual Port 8Gb Fibre Channel to PCI Express
           Network Controller: Integrated Intel I350 Quad-Port Gigabit Adapter, one Intel I350 Dual-Port Gigabit PCIe Adapter
            Hypervisor: VMware ESXi 5.5 U1
Shared Resources  
            Virtualization Management: VMware vCenter Server 5.5
            Storage Array: EMC VNX5800
30 Enterprise Flash Drives (SSDs) and 32 HDDs, grouped as two 10-SSD RAID0 LUNs and four 8-HDD RAID0 LUNs. FAST Cache was configured from 10 SSDs.
            Power Meters: One Yokogawa WT210 per server

Each configuration was tested at five different load points: 1 tile (the lowest load level), 4, 7, 10, and 12 tiles, which was the maximum number of tiles that met Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. All datapoints are the mean of three tests in each configuration.

ESXi Custom Power Settings

ESXi custom power settings influence the power state of the processor. We tested two custom power management settings which had the greatest impact on our workload: Power.MaxFreqPct and Power.CstateResidencyCoef. The advanced ESXi setting Power.MaxFreqPct (default value 100) reduces the processor frequency by placing a cap on the highest operating frequency it can reach. In practice, the processor can operate only at certain set frequencies (P-states), so if the frequency cap requested by ESXi (e.g. 2160MHz) does not match to a set frequency state, the processor will run at the nearest lower frequency state (e.g. 2100MHz). Setting Power.MaxFreqPct = 99 put the cap at 99% of the processor’s nominal frequency, which limited Turbo Boost. Power.MaxFreqPct = 80 further limited the maximum frequency of the processor to 80% of its nominal frequency of 2.7GHz, for a maximum of 2.1GHz. Setting Power.CstateResidencyCoef = 0 (default value 5) puts the processor into its deepest available C-state, or lowest power state, when it is idle. As a prerequisite, deep C-states must be enabled in the BIOS. For a more in-depth discussion of power management techniques and other custom options, please see the vSphere documentation and the whitepaper Host Power Management in VMware vSphere 5.5.

VMmark models energy efficiency as performance score per kilowatt of power consumed. VMmark scores in the graph below have been normalized to the default “Balanced” 1-tile result, which does not use any custom power settings.

VMware ESXi Custom Power Management Settings improve efficiency

A major trend can be seen here; an increase in load is correlated with greater energy efficiency. As the CPUs become busier, throughput increases at a faster rate than the required power. This can be understood by noting that an idle server will still consume power, but with no work to show for it. A highly utilized server is typically the most energy efficient per request completed, and the results bear this out.

To more closely examine the relative impact of each custom setting compared to the default setting, we normalized all results within each load level to the default “Balanced” result for that number of tiles. The figure below shows the percent change at each load level.

VMware ESXi Custom Power Management Settings Change in Efficiency and Performance Results

All custom settings showed improvements in efficiency compared to the default “Balanced” setting. The improvements varied depending on load. Setting MaxFreqPct to 99 had the greatest benefit to energy efficiency, between 5% and 15% at varying load levels. The greatest improvement was seen at 4 tiles, which increased efficiency by 17%, while resulting in a performance decrease of only 3%. The performance cost increased with load to 9% at 12 tiles. However, limiting processor frequency even further to a maximum of 80% of its nominal frequency does not produce an additive effect. Not only did efficiency actually decrease relative to MaxFreqPct=99, but it profoundly curtailed performance from 96% of baseline at light load to 84% of baseline for a heavily loaded machine. CstateResidency=0 produced some modest increases in efficiency for a lightly loaded server, but the effect disappeared at higher load levels.

VMmark 2.5 performance scores are based on application and infrastructure workload throughput, while application latency reflects Quality of Service. For the Mail Server, Olio, and DVD Store 2 workloads, latency is defined as the application’s response time. We wanted to see how custom power management settings affected application latency as opposed to the VMmark score. All latencies are normalized to the lowest 1-tile results.

VMware ESXi Custom Power Management Settings Effect on Application Latencies

Naturally, latencies increase as load increases from 1 to 12 tiles. Fortunately, the custom power management policies caused only minimal increases in application latencies, if any, except for the MaxFreqPct=80 setting which did create elevated latencies across the board.

BIOS Custom Power Settings

The Dell PowerEdge R720 BIOS provides another toolbox of power-saving knobs to tweak. Using the BIOS settings, we manually disabled Turbo Boost and reduced memory frequency from its default maximum speed of 1866MT/s (megatransfers per second) to either 1333MT/s or 800MT/s.

Custom-Power-Management-BIOS-Efficiency

The Turbo Boost Disabled configuration produced the largest increase in efficiency, while 800MT/s memory frequency actually decreased efficiency at the higher load levels.
Again, we normalized all results within each load level to its default “Balanced” result. The figure below shows the percent change at each load level.

Custom-Power-Management-BIOS-Efficiency-and-Perf
Disabling Turbo Boost was the most effective setting to increase energy efficiency, with a performance cost of 2% at low load levels to 8% at high load levels. Reducing memory frequency to 1333MT/s had a reliable but small boost to efficiency and no effect on performance, leading us to conclude that a memory speed of 1866MT/s is simply faster than needed for this workload.

Custom-Power-Management-BIOS-Application-Latencies
Disabling Turbo Boost and reducing memory frequency to 800MT/s increased DVD Store 2 latencies at 10 tiles by 10% and 12 tiles by 30%, but all latencies were still well within Quality of Service requirements.  Reducing memory frequency to 1333MT/s had no effect on application latencies.

Reducing the use of Turbo Boost, using either ESXi custom setting MaxFreqPct or BIOS custom settings, proved to be the most effective way to increase energy efficiency in our VMmark tests. The impact on performance was small, but increased with load. MaxFreqPct is the preferred setting because, like all ESXi custom power management settings, it takes effect immediately and can easily be reversed without reboots or downtime. Other custom power management settings produced modest gains in efficiency, but, if taken to the extreme, not only harm performance but fail to increase efficiency. In addition, energy efficiency is strongly related to load; the most efficient server is also one that is heavily utilized. Taking steps to increase server utilization, such as server consolidation, is an important part of a power saving strategy. Custom power management settings can produce gains in energy efficiency at a cost to performance, so consider the tradeoff when choosing custom power management settings for your own environment.

 How to Configure Custom Power Management Settings

Disclaimer: The results presented above are a case study of the impact of custom power management settings and a starting point only. Results may not apply to your environment and do not represent best practices.

Exercise caution when choosing a custom power management setting. Change settings one at a time to evaluate their impact on your environment. Monitor your server’s power consumption either through its UPS, or consult your vendor to find the rated accuracy of your server’s internal power monitoring sensor. If it is highly accurate, you can view the server’s power consumption in esxtop (press ‘p’ to view Power Usage).

To customize power management settings, enter your server’s BIOS. Power Management settings vary by vendor but most include “OS Controlled” and “Custom” policies.

In the Dell PowerEdge R720, choosing the “Performance Per Watt (OS)” System Profile allows ESXi to control power management, while leaving hardware settings at their default values.

Screenshot of R720 BIOS Selecting OS controlled power managment

Choosing the “Custom” System Profile and setting CPU Power Management to “OS DBPM” allows ESXi to control power management while enabling custom hardware settings.

Screenshot-R720-BIOS

Using ESXi Custom Power Settings

To enable the vSphere custom power management policy,

  1. Browse to the host in the vSphere Web Client navigator.
  2. Click the Manage tab and click Settings.
  3. Under Hardware, select Power Management and click the Edit button.
  4. Select the Custom power management policy and click OK.

The power management policy changes immediately and does not require a server reboot.

Screenshot-VMware-ESXi-Host-Power-Management-SettingScreenshot-VMware-ESXi-Custom-Power-Manangement-Setting

To modify ESXi custom power management settings,

  1. Browse to the host in the vSphere Web Client navigator.
  2. Click the Manage tab and click Settings.
  3. Under System, select Advanced System Settings.
  4. Power management parameters that affect the Custom policy have descriptions that begin with In Custom policy. All other power parameters affect all power management policies.
  5. Select the parameter and click the Edit button.

Note: The default values of power management parameters match the Balanced policy.

Screenshot-VMware-ESXi-Advanced-System-Settings

 

Power Management and Performance in VMware vSphere 5.1 and 5.5

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Power consumption is an important part of the datacenter cost strategy. Physical servers frequently offer a power management scheme that puts processors into low power states when not fully utilized, and VMware vSphere also offers power management techniques. A recent technical white paper describes the testing and results of two performance studies: The first shows how power management in VMware vSphere 5.5 in balanced mode (the default) performs 18% better than the physical host’s balanced mode power management setting. The second study compares vSphere 5.1 performance and power savings in two server models that have different generations of processors. Results show the newer servers have 120% greater performance and 24% improved energy efficiency over the previous generation.

For more information, please read the paper: Power Management and Performance in VMware vSphere 5.1 and 5.5.

VMware vSphere 5.5 Host Power Management (HPM) saves more power and improves performance

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VMware recently released a white paper on the power and performance improvements in the Host Power Management (HPM) feature in vSphere 5.5. With new improvements in HPM, one can save significant power and gain decent performance in many common scenarios. The paper shows that power savings of up to 20% can be achieved in vSphere5.5 by using industry standard SPEC benchmarks. The paper also describes some of the best practices to follow when using HPM.

One experiment indicates that you can get around a 10% increase in performance in vSphere5.5 when deep C-states (greater than C1/halt, e.g., C3 and C6) are enabled along with turbo mode.

For more interesting results and data, please read the full paper

Note: HPM works at a single host level as opposed to DPM which works on a cluster of hosts

Power Management and Performance in ESXi 5.1

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Powering and cooling are a substantial portion of datacenter costs. Ideally, we could minimize these costs by optimizing the datacenter’s energy consumption without impacting performance. The Host Power Management feature, which has been enabled by default since ESXi 5.0, allows hosts to reduce power consumption while boosting energy efficiency by putting processors into a low-power state when not fully utilized.

Power management can be controlled by the either the BIOS or the operating system. In the BIOS, manufacturers provide several types of Host Power Management policies. Although they vary by vendor, most include “Performance,” which does not use any power saving techniques, “Balanced,” which claims to increase energy efficiency with minimal or no impact to performance, and “OS Controlled,” which passes power management control to the operating system. The “Balanced” policy is variably known as “Performance per Watt,” “Dynamic” and other labels; consult your vendor for details. If “OS Controlled” is enabled in the BIOS, ESXi will manage power using one of the policies “High performance,” “Balanced,” “Low power,” or “Custom.” We chose to study Balanced because it is the default setting.

But can the Balanced setting, whether controlled by the BIOS or ESXi, reduce performance relative to the Performance setting? We have received reports from customers who have had performance problems while using the BIOS-controlled Balanced setting. Without knowing the effect of Balanced on performance and energy efficiency, when performance is at a premium users might select the Performance policy to play it safe. To answer this question we tested the impact of power management policies on performance and energy efficiency using VMmark 2.5.

VMmark 2.5 is a multi-host virtualization benchmark that uses varied application workloads as well as common datacenter operations to model the demands of the datacenter. VMs running diverse application workloads are grouped into units of load called tiles. For more details, see the VMmark 2.5 overview.

We tested three policies: the BIOS-controlled Performance setting, which uses no power management techniques, the ESXi-controlled Balanced setting (with the BIOS set to OS-Controlled mode), and the BIOS-controlled Balanced setting. The ESXi Balanced and BIOS-controlled Balanced settings cut power by reducing processor frequency and voltage among other power saving techniques.

We found that the ESXi Balanced setting did an excellent job of preserving performance, with no measurable performance impact at all levels of load. Not only was performance on par with expectations, but it did so while producing consistent improvements in energy efficiency, even while idle. By comparison, the BIOS Balanced setting aggressively saved power but created higher latencies and reduced performance. The following results detail our findings.

Testing Methodology
All tests were conducted on a four-node cluster running VMware vSphere 5.1. We compared performance and energy efficiency of VMmark between three power management policies: Performance, the ESXi-controlled Balanced setting, and the BIOS-controlled Balanced setting, also known as “Performance per Watt (Dell Active Power Controller).”

Configuration
Systems Under Test: Four Dell PowerEdge R620 servers
CPUs (per server): One Eight-Core Intel® Xeon® E5-2665 @ 2.4 GHz, Hyper-Threading enabled
Memory (per server): 96GB DDR3 ECC @ 1067 MHz
Host Bus Adapter: Two QLogic QLE2562, Dual Port 8Gb Fibre Channel to PCI Express
Network Controller: One Intel Gigabit Quad Port I350 Adapter
Hypervisor: VMware ESXi 5.1.0
Storage Array: EMC VNX5700
62 Enterprise Flash Drives (SSDs), RAID 0, grouped as 3 x 8 SSD LUNs, 7 x 5 SSD LUNs, and 1 x 3 SSD LUN
Virtualization Management: VMware vCenter Server 5.1.0
VMmark version: 2.5
Power Meters: Three Yokogawa WT210

Results
To determine the maximum VMmark load supported for each power management setting, we increased the number of VMmark tiles until the cluster reached saturation, which is defined as the largest number of tiles that still meet Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. All data points are the mean of three tests in each configuration and VMmark scores are normalized to the BIOS Balanced one-tile score.

Effects of Power Management on VMmark 2.5 score

The VMmark scores were equivalent between the Performance setting and the ESXi Balanced setting with less than a 1% difference at all load levels. However, running on the BIOS Balanced setting reduced the VMmark scores an average of 15%. On the BIOS Balanced setting, the environment was no longer able to support nine tiles and, even at low loads, on average, 31% of runs failed QoS requirements; only passing runs are pictured above.

We also compared the improvements in energy efficiency of the two Balanced settings against the Performance setting. The Performance per Kilowatt metric, which is new to VMmark 2.5, models energy efficiency as VMmark score per kilowatt of power consumed. More efficient results will have a higher Performance per Kilowatt.

Effects of Power Management on Energy Efficiency

Two trends are visible in this figure. As expected, the Performance setting showed the lowest energy efficiency. At every load level, ESXi Balanced was about 3% more energy efficient than the Performance setting, despite the fact that it delivered an equivalent score to Performance. The BIOS Balanced setting had the greatest energy efficiency, 20% average improvement over Performance.

Second, increase in load is correlated with greater energy efficiency. As the CPUs become busier, throughput increases at a faster rate than the required power. This can be understood by noting that an idle server will still consume power, but with no work to show for it. A highly utilized server is typically the most energy efficient per request completed, which is confirmed in our results. Higher energy efficiency creates cost savings in host energy consumption and in cooling costs.

The bursty nature of most environments leads them to sometimes idle, so we also measured each host’s idle power consumption. The Performance setting showed an average of 128 watts per host, while ESXi Balanced and BIOS Balanced consumed 85 watts per host. Although the Performance and ESXi Balanced settings performed very similarly under load, hosts using ESXi Balanced and BIOS Balanced power management consumed 33% less power while idle.

VMmark 2.5 scores are based on application and infrastructure workload throughput, while application latency reflects Quality of Service. For the Mail Server, Olio, and DVD Store 2 workloads, latency is defined as the application’s response time. We wanted to see how power management policies affected application latency as opposed to the VMmark score. All latencies are normalized to the lowest results.

Effects of Power Management on VMmark 2.5 Latencies

Whereas the Performance and ESXi Balanced latencies tracked closely, BIOS Balanced latencies were significantly higher at all load levels. Furthermore, latencies were unpredictable even at low load levels, and for this reason, 31% of runs between one and eight tiles failed; these runs are omitted from the figure above. For example, half of the BIOS Balanced runs did not pass QoS requirements at four tiles. These higher latencies were the result of aggressive power saving by the BIOS Balanced policy.

Our tests showed that ESXi’s Balanced power management policy didn’t affect throughput or latency compared to the Performance policy, but did improve energy efficiency by 3%. While the BIOS-controlled Balanced policy improved power efficiency by an average of 20% over Performance, it was so aggressive in cutting power that it often caused VMmark to fail QoS requirements.

Overall, the BIOS controlled Balanced policy produced substantial efficiency gains but with unpredictable performance, failed runs, and reduced performance at all load levels. This policy may still be suitable for some workloads which can tolerate this unpredictability, but should be used with caution. On the other hand, the ESXi Balanced policy produced modest efficiency gains while doing an excellent job protecting performance across all load levels. These findings make us confident that the ESXi Balanced policy is a good choice for most types of virtualized applications.

Host Power Management in vSphere 5

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Host power management (HPM) on ESXi 5.0 saves energy by placing certain parts of a computer system or device into a reduced power state when the system or device is inactive or does not need to run at maximum speed. This feature can be used in conjunction with distributed power management (DPM), which redistributes VMs among physical hosts in a cluster to enable some hosts to be powered off completely.

The default power policy for HPM in vSphere 5 is “balanced,” which reduces host power consumption while having little or no impact on performance for most workloads. The balanced policy uses the processor’s P-states, which save power when the workloads running on the system do not require full CPU capacity.

A technical white paper has been published that describes:

  • What to adjust in your ESXi host’s BIOS settings to achieve the maximum benefit of HPM.
  • The different power policy options in ESXi 5.0 and how to set a custom policy.
  • Using esxtop to obtain and understand statistics related to HPM, including the ESXi host’s power usage, the processor’s P-states, and the effect of HPM on %USED and %UTIL.
  • An evaluation of the power that HPM can save while different power policies are enabled. The amount of power saved varies depending on the CPU load and the power policy.

For the full paper, see Host Power Management in VMware vSphere 5.

Note: Some performance-sensitive workloads might require the "high performance" policy.