A peek into Extended Page Tables Part 2

  It has been nearing a month since I posted my blog on Extended Page Tables and it&aposs niceties, I had promised to come up with a follow-up blog with some hands on test runs I had planned to run in my lab. With burgeoning  to do list from work and endless meetings per day, finally I made sometime and setup a testbed in the lab. My goal was to run some workload on the hardware setup with Extended Page Table enabled to help the virtual machine to  translate memory address, then I also planned to rerun the workload on the same hardware setup without EPT and perform a comparison of both result sets. I wanted to keep the test simple enough to achieve my goal while making sure results are repeatable with multiple runs. Workload I decided to use open source workload called DVD Store, this workload was developed by Dell and passed over to open source community, it comes in varients of Microsoft SQL server, Oracle Database server and MySql Database server. The Database schema is made up of eight tables and few store procedures and transactions. The workload comes in Three different DB sizes of 10MB, 1GB and 100GB. However being an open source workload, it allows us to tweak the size of the database and customize is to suit specific size requirement. I went ahead and tweaked the database to be of 2GB in size, this allowed me to fit the Database and log files on the storage devices I had in the lab without going for an expensive SAN based storage. As the name of the workload says, this is a order processing OLTP database workload simulating customers browsing through the store and adding selected DVDs and completing the order. Primary metric coming out of the workload is the number of orders processed during the workload execution period, secondary metric is average milliseconds taken to process each order.

HardwareServerIntel S5520UR Dual socket server.CPU: Intel Xeon X5550 2.67 GHz 8 coresRAM: 12GB DDR3Hard drive: 500GB SATA II 7.2K RPM holding OS partition, IntelNIC: Embedded 1Ge full duplex.Keyboard, mouse and MonitorClientGateway E-4610S SBCPU: Intel Core2 Duo 4300 1.80GHzRAM: 1GBHarddrive: 80GB SATA IINIC: Embedded 1Ge full duplex.OS: Windows XP professional with SP3.SoftwareVMWARE ESX 3.5 U3VMWARE ESX 4.0Microsoft Windows 2008 enterprise server 64bit editionMicrosoft SQL 2005 64bitI wanted to go with Solid state drives to ensure I am not disk bound anytime while running the workload, the alternative to run the workload without SSD would be to use a boatload of conventional hardrives increasing the setup complexity and foot print of my test hardware. Just using 3nos Intel SSDs makes life easier and provides terrific I/O performance.Test MethodologyI not going to delve deeper on how to setup the environment, OS instalaltion, application setup, and customizing the workload these topics are out of scope for this blog. But since it is required to know on how I ran my tests, I will talk about the methodology just enough for readers to understand the workload execution method and test duration, which helps in understanding the result chart below. Test was run from the client machine usinf workload driver and was ran for 10 minutes at a stretch and for Three times just to ensure the results were repeatable. The number of orders executed were pretty much close to with +- 100-200 OPM.ResultsOPMAbove chart shows number of Orders the server was able to execute per minute. The X-Axis represents the number of vCPUs allocated to the virtual machine and Y-Axis shows the orders per minute. With each additional vCPU added to the virtual machine the number of orders executed by the server increases, as you can notice in the chart there is a 15%, 18% and 31% increase in number of OPM clearly scaling up with additional vCPUs allocated to the virtualmachine.Response time.Above chart shows the average response time as to complete one order, you there is a 15% to 40% decrease in response time comapred between server running without EPT assitance and server with EPT enabled. Not only the server can perform more transactions at the given time, but can do that with less time than it took doing it on non EPT based servers.ConclusionWhen I completed my workload execution and came started seeing the data, it was apparent to me that EPT plays the major factor in improving performance of any virtualized workload. With virtualization technology achieving wide spread adoptability, IT orgs are exploring on how virtualize applications which were left untouched till now due to fear of peformance degradation and blowing up the SLA promised to the business. But Technologies like EPT provides enough reasons for the IT managers to start thinking about virtualizing critical workloads like SQL, Exchange etc. This is the last part of the Two part series blog in EPT. Feel free to comment if you have any questions.Bhaskar D Gowda.

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VirtenSys Delivers Solution to Virtualize Servers’ Direct-Attached Storage and Disk Drives

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VirtenSys today announced the industry’s first virtualization of storage controllers and disk drives in servers. With this achievement, VirtenSys becomes the first company to consolidate and optimize the most commonly deployed networking and storage connectivity in servers. VirtenSys IOV switches now support Ethernet, SAS/SATA and Fibre Channel, and provide servers with the best price/performance and lowest energy consumption for accessing not only the local area networks (LAN), but also the storage infrastructures, including direct-attached storage (DAS) and storage area networks (SAN). The company has already delivered pre-production units of its switches to leading server and storage customers.

VirtenSys IOV switches now virtualize the LSI MegaRAID Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) and share them between multiple physical servers, without introducing any changes to the servers, operating systems, applications, HBAs or device drivers. As a result, SAS/SATA disk drives are also consolidated inside the switches and allocated between the connected servers. The VirtenSys IOV systems dramatically reduce data center operational expense and complexity, improve I/O utilization to greater than 80 percent, enhance throughput, half equipment cost and reduce I/O power consumption by more than 60 percent.

VirtenSys IOV switches create virtualized I/O Clouds where servers’ I/O resources are pooled, consolidated, and dynamically allocated on demand based on the applications needs. The IOV switches provide servers connected to the I/O Cloud with the full connectivity bandwidth to the corporate network and storage infrastructures, eliminate multiple layers of aggregation switches, I/O adapters, disk drives and cables and extend the data center’s lifecycle. In addition, the switches reduce management expenses by 60 percent by removing the need for physical reconfiguration and minimizing human intervention. Deploying IOV switches and setting up virtual I/O Clouds is totally transparent to servers, networks, and management processes, protecting organizations’ investments in their IT infrastructure while speeding the migration towards new usage models such as cloud computing.

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ScaleMP Completes vSMP Foundation Certification For HP ProLiant BL280c G6 Server Blades

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ScaleMP completed certification of vSMP Foundation for HP ProLiant BL280c G6 server blades offering the new Intel Xeon Processor 5500 series. vSMP Foundation coupled with the HP ProLiant BL280c G6 server blade solution delivers excellent performance and energy savings to reduce overall datacenter spending in power constrained scale-out environments.

vSMP Foundation aggregates multiple industry-standard off-the-shelf x86 servers into one single virtual high-end system for the High-Performance Computing (HPC) market. vSMP Foundation provides customers with an alternative to traditional expensive symmetrical multiprocessor (SMP) systems and also offers simplified clustering infrastructure with a single operating system. It supports aggregation of up to 16 servers into a single virtual SMP system, providing:

• Up to 4 terabytes (TB) of shared memory for large memory requirements
• Up to 128 cores virtual SMP, proven scalability and record-breaking memory bandwidth
• Ease of use and lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for applications, with simplified cluster management and storage architecture
• Improved utilization through a centralized and consolidated architecture

The new HP ProLiant BL280c G6 server blade has been designed for high performance and scale-out datacenters. With outstanding dual-processor performance and price per watt, the HP ProLiant BL280c helps reduce overall datacenter power consumption while maintaining high performance. The new Intel® Xeon® 5500 series processors provide significant performance improvements and faster I/O throughput. The new DDR3 memory technology is more energy efficient and has better cooling than existing memory options. Overall, the HP ProLiant BL280c offers customers the latest technology for improved power efficiency and performance optimization. These blades feature up to 96 GB of ECC DDR 3 DIMMS, two PCI-express expansion slots, and support both SA and SATA HDD drives.

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