Infrastructure as a Service: Benchmarking Cloud Computing
by Johan De Gelas on June 2, 2011 8:50 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- IT Computing general
- Cloud Computing
Benchmarking the Terremark Cloud
We wanted to compare the virtual IaaS servers of the Terremark Enterprise Cloud with a virtualized physical server, because that is the decision you will have to make: will you deploy your application on a server in your own local data center, or will you deploy to a virtual server in an IaaS environment?
The "In House" Reference Machine
Nowadays most applications find a home inside a virtual machine on top of a hypervisor. Since Terremark servers have Intel's Xeon 7500s inside, we decided to use a reference machine based on the same platform. We used the QSSC-4R machine, equipped with four Xeon X7560 CPUs running at 2.26GHz. We ran vSphere 4.1 Update 1, basedpon the 64-bit ESX 4.1.0 b348481 hypervisor on top of this server.
| CPU | 4x Xeon X7560 at 2.26GHz |
| RAM | 16x4GB Samsung Registered DDR3-1333 at 1066MHz |
| Motherboard | QCI QSSC-S4R 31S4RMB00B0 |
| Chipset | Intel 7500 |
| BIOS version | QSSC-S4R.QCI.01.00.S012,031420111618 |
| PSU | 4x Delta DPS-850FB A S3F E62433-004 850W |
Typically, a group of virtual machines share the CPU, memory and storage resources that have been allocated to their "resource pool", so we tested the "in house" machine in two ways. In the first benchmark run, virtual machines were only limited by the amount of virtual CPUs they were given. The one OLAP virtual machine got to eight virtual CPUs, and our three web servers each got two virtual CPUs. With sixteen total CPU cores, that means the OLAP machine is able to use up to eight physical CPUs and each web server is able to use two physical CPUs.
In the second benchmark setup, we limited the virtual machines (14 virtual CPUs in total) to a resource pool of 10GHz of CPU power. This is similar to the Terremark setup (as well as other "cloud" setups), which also use resource pools to make optimal use of the underlying hardware. After all, it is costly to reserve hardware resources if they are not being used.
The Terremark Virtual Server Infrastructure
We reserved 5GHz (10GHz limit) of CPU power, 10GB of RAM, and 215GB of storage space in the Terremark Enterprise Cloud. We tested this IaaS cloud in two ways. First, we disabled the burst function, which means that we are limited to a maximum of 10GHz of CPU power. Second, we enabled the burst function. In that case, the Terremark Infrastructure will offer extra CPU power, but the amount of processing power that will be made available to your server depends on how heavy the Terremark cluster is currently loaded. Terremark guarantees that in all circumstances 20% extra resources are available, and during our tests we saw up to 24GHz was made available to us.
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Mxlasm - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
This question is probably not to Anand but to some fellow readers who may wish to educate the uneducated :)In the setup descibed, can one virtual computer/OS span many physical systems? Can someone please point me to a good (wiki?) article about how that is done? There are many text about the subject of virtualization in general, but hard to nail some specific questions.
Also, how many cores max can one virtual system get? Or, in other words, if the physical system has so many cores, can you request more cores, and how can your virtual system can be efficiently scaled up if you are already reaching the max of one physical server?
Thanks!
bobbozzo - Saturday, June 4, 2011 - link
Currently, a single virtual server cannot span more than one physical server, BUT VMs can be MIGRATED between multiple physical servers in case one physical server is too busy or is failing.You can pretend you have more cores than you really do by limiting the GHz for each VM, or possibly by just over-allocating VMs and hoping they don't all get busy at once.
Regardless, if the server is maxed out, all you can do to get more performance is to migrate VMs to another server.
HMTK - Monday, June 6, 2011 - link
vSphere can currently use 6 or 12 CPU CORES (HT does not count as a core) per physical CPU. The exact number is determined by licensing. If you want to use 12 cores be prepared to pay a lot. Personally I think this is idiotic and hopefully VMware changes this in vSphere 5 later this year.VM's can use 4 or 8 vCPU's with 8 vCPU's limited to the expensive Enterprise Plus SKU.
Kid98 - Sunday, June 5, 2011 - link
You don't have to look very hard to find others with similar solutions. (cloudshare.com is one)Seems a bit like Terremark is being presented as the premier choice. How can that be ascertained without comparison to others?
Kid
sushanthr77 - Tuesday, June 7, 2011 - link
Thanks for the excellent article. Most articles about cloud are too vague and dwell into the abstracts that the details. This was well structured and presented.ProDigit - Sunday, June 12, 2011 - link
I find cloud computing nothing more than taking a bus or train in public transport!The caveats are more than the benefits. There's nothing like having your own vehicle to drive!
So with computing!
Have your own hardware, and don't depend on your internet connection to provide what hardware should!
vinaywagh - Wednesday, June 29, 2011 - link
I enjoyed reading this article. But what it lacks is a cost benefit analysis. If I were to setup a small datacenter today, I would need to hire IT engineers and pay for the power and space for it which would cost me $x. What I want to know is to get the same performance as the local server, what would it cost me to move it to the cloud ?vlang :: crmhelpdesksoftware.com - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 - link
Thank you for details re Terremark from your perspective.ShirleyBurnell - Friday, September 20, 2019 - link
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