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Mittwoch Mrz 11, 2009

Need a proof? Here you go...

Folks, long time no entry. I've really missed my personal goal of blogging more about my topics. Anyway. Now is the time to write about an exciting news: We (Sun Microsystems) broke the world-record and lead the VMware VMmark results as of today with the Sun Fire X4600 M2!! For a detailed report click here.

What's so exciting about this news? Pretty simple: we are showing by this result, that the Sun Fire X4600 M2 is the first choice for VMware ESX virtualized environments leaving other vendor systems (eg. HP ProLiant DL785 G5 or IBM System x3950 M2) far behind it. If you take a closer look at the VMmark results you see that other vendors within the 32 core area will also achieve the same number of VMmark tiles (19 tiles equals 19 x 6 virtual machines equals 114 virtual machines), but the Sun Fire X4600 M2 will give the customer a higher bandwith with the same workload.

If you also take a look at the HP Proliant DL785 G5 VMmark result and compare it to our world-record result you will recognize that our systems was tested with "just" 128 GB RAM compared to 256 GB of RAM that was used by HP. Beside this world-record result the Sun Fire X4600 M2 beats HP Proliant DL 785 G5 in different ways: 

  • 4 Rackunits (Sun Fire X4600 M2) vs. 7 Rackunits (HP Proliant DL 785 G5)
  • 2-, 4-, 6- and 8-Socket configurations (Sun Fire X4600 M2) vs. 4- and 8-Socket configurations (HP Proliant DL 785 G5)
  • 4 onboard GBE NICs (Sun Fire X4600 M2) vs. 2 onboard GBE NICs (HP Proliant DL 785 G5)
From my point of view there is no technical reason for using the HP Proliant DL 785 G5 in favor of our Sun Fire X4600 M2.

Comparing our result to the IBM System x3950 M2 VMmark result there are some more differences:

  • IBM uses Intel Xeons vs AMD Opteron
  • IBM used an older version of ESX Server (Update 2 vs. Update 3)

Ok. There might be some performance impacts using a more current ESX version. But I'm pretty sure that this is not the reason why IBM can just start 18 tiles (18 tiles equals 18 x 6 virtual machines equals 108 virtual machines). I think the reason for the far lower VMmark result is because of the system architecture. IBM System x3950 M2 scales up to 32 processors - but not within on box. They using some proprietary chipset (IBM X3 architecture) within there system to interconnect up to 8 chassis acting as one large system. The Intel Xeon architecture was not build for systems with more than 4 sockets and IBM tried to cirumvent this limitiation by building there own chipset. AMD has an architicture that will scale very well up to 8 socket systems since some days now. Compared the system side-by-side, you can see the following advantages of the Sun Fire X4600 M2 against IBM System x3950 M2:

  • 4 Rackunits (Sun Fire X4600 M2) vs. 6 Rackunits (2 chassis of IBM System x3950 M2)
  • PCI-Express I/O (Sun Fire X4600 M2) vs. PCI-X I/O (IBM System x3950 M2)
  • 4 onboard GBE NICs (Sun Fire X4600 M2) vs. 2 onboard GBE NICs (within one chassis of IBM System x3950 M2)
  • 512 GB RAM (Sun Fire X4600 M2) vs. 64 GB RAM (within one chassis of IBM System x3950 M2)
Well. This was just a short comparision of the No. 1 VMmark result (Sun Fire X4600 M2) versus the No. 3 (HP Proliant DL 785 G5) and No. 4 (IBM System x3950 M2) results. Missing No. 2? It's a really nice system from Unisys (Unisys ES7000 Model 7405R). If you take a look here you might find out the reason why I'm not unhappy that this systems got the second rank world record.

Posted at 03:24PM Mrz 11, 2009 by Tobias Esser in Sun  |  Kommentare[0]