The Xeon E5-2600: Dual Sandy Bridge for Servers
by Johan De Gelas on March 6, 2012 9:27 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- Virtualization
- Xeon
- Opteron
- Cloud Computing
Virtualization Performance: Linux VMs on ESXi
We introduced our new vApus FOS (For Open Source) server workloads in our review of the Facebook "Open Compute" servers. In a nutshell, it a mix of four VMs with open source workloads: two PhpBB websites (Apache2, MySQL), one OLAP MySQL "Community server 5.1.37" database, and one VM with VMware's open source groupware Zimbra 7.1.0. Zimbra is quite a complex application as it contains the following components:
- Jetty, the web application server
- Postfix, an open source mail transfer agent
- OpenLDAP software, user authentication
- MySQL is the database
- Lucene full-featured text and search engine
- ClamAV, an anti-virus scanner
- SpamAssassin, a mail filter
- James/Sieve filtering (mail)
All VMs are based on a minimal CentOS 6 setup with VMware Tools installed. All our current virtualization testing is on top of the hypervisor which we know best: ESXi (5.0). We have changed two things in our vApusMark FOS setup: we upgradeded the guestOS from 5.6 to 6.0 and increased the number of vCPUs of the OLAP VM from 2 to 4. This small upgrade means that our latest results should not be compared to the results in our older articles.
We (Tijl Deneut and myself) tested with four tiles (one tile = four VMs). Each tile needs nine vCPUs, so the test requires 36 vCPUs.
The benchmark above measures throughput. As for response times, let's take a look at the table below, which gives you the average response time per VM:
vApus FOS Average Response Times (ms), lower is better! | ||||||||
CPU | PhpBB1 | PHPBB2 | MySQL OLAP | Zimbra | ||||
AMD Opteron 6276 2.3 | 671 | 514 | 1410 | 758 | ||||
AMD Opteron 6174 2.2 | 674 | 524 | 1210 | 861 | ||||
Intel Xeon E5-2660 2.2 | 645 | 394 | 160 | 631 | ||||
Intel Xeon E5-2690 2.9 | 362 | 288 | 40 | 483 | ||||
Intel Xeon X5650 2.66 | 745 | 569 | 821 | 866 |
Considering that we may assume that the Xeon E5-2690 consumes considerably more than the E5-2660, it looks like the Xeon E5-2660 is the new virtualization champ. Let us check out the power consumption numbers under a realistic load.
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MrSpadge - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
Put some sarcasm tags in there to save some people from getting confused...cynic783 - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
definitely sarcastic. i was actually surprised not to see any fanbois so I thought I'd pretendbadjohny - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
I have no doubt these chips or something similar will end up in the new mac pros. Who are in a very bad need of a refresh.Shuxclams - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
Looking at a complete visualization transformation in our server room, looks like the decision was made for us as far as architecture. Wow....TeXWiller - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
<quote>The new Xeon also supports faster DDR-3 1600. Contrary to the Interlagos Opteron which can only support this memory speed with one DIMM per channel</quote>Interlagos supports memory up to DDR3-1600 using two single rank memory modules, or one single rank and one double rank module if using registered memory, and two single rank modules if using unbuffered memory. DDR3-1866 is supported on a single load-reduced registered, or on a single unbuffered module per channel. It depends on the board manufacturer and more importantly, it can be all read on the manual, so to speak.davegraham - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
AMD Interlagos can support more than 1 DDR3-1600 ECC/REG dimm per channel. I run 8 on a single socket 6276 and it works at the rated speed.TeXWiller - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
Too bad these kinds of errors in the articles are not usually fixed.JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
I will double check .meloz - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
Just wanted to congratulate Johan on a job well done. Very thorough analysis, Intel have achieved a very dominant position with this new platform and this is reflected in pricing of their processors as well!AMD was already a sub 10% niche (with a market share to mirror) in the data center, now even that niche has evaporated.
New Opterons (based on Piledriver) might decrease the performance gap to Intel under certain benchmarks, but I doubt they will beat Intel. Intel has plenty of SKUs above the quickest AMD Opterons to adjust prices and kill any new challenge from AMD, instantly.
JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
Thanks! Although I hope Intel gets a bit more competition though.