VMware/VMmark Sun Fire X4450 Best 24 Core Result and watts

Wednesday Jan 14, 2009

The Sun Fire X4450 powered by four 6-core Intel Xeon X7460 processors at 2.66 GHz, has achieved a score of 19.47 @14 tiles, supporting 84 fully fledged VM instances (14 Tiles). This result puts the SUN X4450 on the leading front of 4-socket/24 cores Intel-based VMware servers.

This results beats IBM x3850-M2 result to date of 19.10 @ 14 tiles and all the other Intel based submissions in the 24 cores category with similar architecture while using equal or smaller memory footprint (80GB) then the other systems.

The Sun Fire X4450 server, equipped with four 6C Xeon X7460, provides a highly scalable virtualization platform, that, in combination with the VMware ESX Server 3.5.0 hypervisor, takes full advantage of Intel Virtualization Technology.

To support 14 tiles per server , efficient and reliable Sun StorageTek 2540 Fibre Channel arrays with Sun StorageTek 2501 SAS expansion units were used. This family of arrays offers enterprise-class, reliable RAID-protected functionality in a high-density 2 RU package and is well suited for virtualization environments.

The electrical Power consumption measured for the 4-socket 6C 80GB server during the benchmark runs was on average: 933 Watts (Idle 750 Watts).

The electrical Power consumption for the data storage during the benchmark runs for each disk array and workload type was on average:

• 1x STK2540 (database workloads): 304 Watts (Idle 296 Watts)
• 1x STK2540 (Tile workloads except database): 306 Watts (Idle 296 Watts)
• 1x STK2501 (Tile workloads except database): 261 Watts (Idle 253 Watts)

Sun is the first vendor (and only) to disclose actual power consumption measured while running VMmark, the industry's most popular virtualization workload.

VMmark Performance Results for 24 Cores, Benchmark Score (bigger is better)

System	Socket/ Core/ Thrds	GHz Type	GB	ESX ver	Spindle	Mirr	Tiles	Score	Date Pub
Sun Fire X4450	4/24/24	2.66 Xeon X7460	80GB	3.5.0U2	192	n	14	19.47	13-Jan-09
IBM x3850 M2	4/24/24	2.66 Xeon X7460	80GB	3.5.0U2	166	n	14	19.10	17-Sep-08
Dell PE R900	4/24/24	2.66 Xeon X7460	128GB	3.5.0U2	140	n	14	18.96	02-Dec-08
HP PL DL580 G5	4/24/24	2.66 Xeon X7460	96GB	3.5.0U2	168	n	14	18.56	18-Aug-08

Complete benchmark results may be found at the VMware benchmark website http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results.html.

Benchmark Description

VMmark is the first benchmark that was designed specifically to quantify and measure the performance of virtualized environments. It features a novel tile-based scheme for measuring the scalability of consolidated workloads and provides a consistent methodology that captures both the overall scalability and individual application performance.

The VMmark benchmark is built on VMware's expertise in virtualization performance and incorporates popular workloads from application categories most commonly represented in customer data centers.

The purpose of this benchmark is to measure performance and scalability of a pre-established mix of workloads (a Tile), which allows comparisons among similar configuration platforms.

A Tile consists of 6 fixed workload applications, each running in its own Virtual Machine (VM) (6 VMs per Tile) such as Mail, Java, Web, Database and File Serving plus a standby server which only purpose is to provide a spare Virtual Machine that does not do any work and is not accounted in the score.

VMmark benchmark provides two key performance metrics:

1. The number of tiles supported by a system, which is an indication of how many systems/applications can be consolidated on one platform where the higher the number of tiles supported the higher the number of consolidated systems.
2. The Score, which is an overall measure of the amount of work that is accomplished by all the Tiles in the system and summarizes the level of service of all the workloads during a benchmark run. The score or amount of work is a composition of Actions/minute(Mail server), New Orders/minute(Java server), Access/minute(web server), Commits/minute(Database), MB/second(file server). Thus, among systems with the same number of tiles, the system with the higher score is the system that is capable of producing the greater amount of work.

For detailed description of VMmark, tiles and score definition, please refer to VMmark Features

Disclosure Statement:

VMware(R) VMmark(R) is a product of VMware, an EMC Company. VMmark utilizes SPECjbb2005(TM) and SPECweb2005(TM), which are available from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). Results from http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/ as of January 13, 2009.

Result Information

Certified Results
	Score:		19.47@14-tiles
	Server:		Sun Fire X4450
	Processors:		4-socket 2.66 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon X7460
	Memory:		80 GB
	VMware ESX Server:		3.5.0 Update 2
	VMmark:		1.1
	Storage:		9 x STK2540, 7x STK2501, each storage array using 12x146GB 15K RPM disks

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Posted at 07:40AM Jan 14, 2009 in Benchmark Issues
Tags: performance power vmmark watts