We all know that IT is using virtualization on x86 servers to solve tough data center challenges (server sprawl, accelerating power and cooling costs, the need to extend life of current facilities, achieving high-availability and disaster recovery through live migration, etc.) 

But which x86 servers are they using? According to IDC’s q3’08 Server Virtualization tracker, 85% of all the x86 servers deployed in 2008 for virtualization were based on Intel® Xeon® processors. 

Ok, next question: Is there a benefit to going with scalable 4 Socket servers (Multi-processor) vs. 2 socket servers (Dual-Processor)?  It’s a religious argument really, but as IT budgets continue to tighten, scalable 4 Socket servers offer more ‘capabilities’ (i.e. processors, memory, I/O ports and reliability features) that enable higher consolidation ratios. 

So I thought I would write about 5 specific scenarios where you should see a benefit to scalable 4 Socket (MP) servers over 2 Socket newest (DP).  Tell us if you agree or disagree.

1. Higher Consolidation Ratios for Memory-Constrained Apps

Do you have a bunch of apps that you need to keep running but at the same time face tremendous pressure to address the challenges listed above?  A key advantage of scalable servers is that they can be configured with more memory than smaller 2S servers, typically 2x-4x more.  Often times, especially with multi-core processors, virtual machines will run into memory constraints before they run into processor constraints.  A 2x-4x memory capacity advantage can translate into 2x-4x the VMs.  Scalable servers also tend to use available memory more efficiently, since code and data can be stored once and shared among multiple virtual machines.  Solvay Pharmaceuticals, for example, intends to run with consolidation ratios as high as 25:1 on 4 Socket Xeon servers. 

2. Performance and Reliability for Business-Critical Workloads

Intel’s launch last September of the Xeon 7400 processor (6-cores, 16mb shared L3 cache) brings 24 processing cores and up to 256gb memory (32 dimm slots x 8gb dimms) to a 4 Socket Server environment.   This provides a lot of resources for demanding applications and unexpected workload spikes.  Tests within Intel’s IT department have shown that 4-socket servers show much less variation in throughput than comparable 2-socket servers as virtualized workloads are increased. 

3. Faster and More Cost-Effective Test and Development

Development teams can be demanding.  The faster IT can provision testing environments for the developers the better.  Scalable servers offer more headroom to deploy additional dev environments when needed, without waiting for new physical servers to be provisioned. Scalable servers can also support a broader range of applications, including enterprise applications that may require the processor, memory and I/O resources of a large, multi-processor system.  Using the same Solvay Pharmaceuticals example listed above, they were able to deploy new apps in 10 min vs. 1 week prior to deploying virtualization on Xeon based servers.

4. Larger and More Robust Flexible Resource Pools

With VMware Virtual Infrastructure, applications can be migrated without downtime among all the servers in a resource pool, which can include up to 32 physical hosts (in a VMware HA* or VMware DRS* cluster).  Using larger, scalable servers would simply expand the capacity of those resource pools due to the additional memory, processors, I/O, etc. 

5. Better Utilization of Limited Data Center Resources

Many data centers are operating at or near the limit of their power, cooling and networking capacity. By using larger, scalable servers to increase consolidation ratios, IT can reduce power and cooling requirements and share local area network (LAN) and storage area network (SAN) ports more efficiently – all of which can help defer the high cost of new data center construction. 

Let us know what you think…

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That's real dialogue from our recent "Live Chat" forum that brought together Intel Experts on XEON 7400-series product, Intel Architecture, Server Platforms, Visual Computing, Energy, and many other interesting topics. Live Chat is so new to the tech enthusiast, many were'nt sure we were real people and not internet bots....

Question: Are you for real or is this a bot?

Answer: I'm real... no bots today. :^)

The topics included virtualization, intel architecture, gaming, processor TDP, and many others. Check out the transcripts to see what all the chatting is about...

Live Chat: North America

Live Chat: Asia Pacific

At Oracle OpenWorld in the Dell booth on September 22nd – 24th, we educated a large number of IT managers and Oracle Database Administrators about how best to harness the power of the new Xeon 7400 processor for their Oracle Middleware and Database environments. Check out this video and learn about the Xeon 7400 based Dell PowerEdge R900, the features / benefits of this new platform, the virtualization performance advantages, and the energy efficiency benefits of Intel’s 45nm manufacturing process.

Recently our team completed a comprehensive analysis comparing two and four socket server platforms based on both 65nm and 45nm processors. The comparison included the just recently launched Intel ® Xeon ® X7460 processor featuring 6 high-performance Core micro-architecture based cores. Servers based on this new processor have been setting all kinds of performance world-records across a wide range of benchmarks and we were very interested to see how these servers would fare in our virtualization tests. Needless to say, our server platform based on this new high-end processor did not disappoint – it delivered on all its promise both in terms of absolute performance as well as performance/watt. We have included these results in a brand new IT@Intel whitepaper published recently.

In addition to performance comparisons, this paper also includes a comprehensive comparative analysis spanning a wide range of commonly occurring virtualization deployment scenarios in the enterprise. For instance, are you looking to select a server platform that will enable you to host the maximum number of VMs for a given TCO (we discuss the key components of the TCO model in the paper)? Assuming that you are interested in optimizing your TCO, are you aware that the answer might change depending on the specifics of your situation e.g., are the majority of your workloads performance SLA-centric or memory capacity focused or a combination of the two(we cover what these terms mean in the paper)? What happens if your primary concern is not the overall TCO but lack of datacenter power and/or cooling capacity - is a particular server platform preferable to the others in that situation? How about if the primary constraint you are concerned with has to do with limited number of available LAN/SAN connectivity ports in the Datacenter - does that change the "answer"? What if your enterprise architect says that maximizing resource pool capacity is his primary objective and TCO is a secondary concern - does that have any implications for your server platform selection? What if you want to ensure the most predictable performance scaling in the event of unanticipated workload spikes - does your choice of server virtualization platform make a difference?

We cover the important deployment scenarios relevant for this comparison (including answering the questions in the preceding paragraph) in this new IT@Intel paper. This paper and the companion short video summarizing the key findings can be accessed at www.intel.com/it. Please check it out and let us know if you agree or if we have missed the mark!

The Intel® Xeon® 7400 Processor was officially announced just a few weeks ago and there has been phenomonal interest in this product because of it's world record breaking performance leadership as well as it's great energy efficiency.

Let's first discuss one of the primary advantages of the Intel® Xeon® 7400 Processor: Up to 50% better performance/watt and up to 10% less system power vs. 7300. As stated, this is pretty straightforward: Intel has real world results that show significant performance increases while consuming less power as compared to servers based on the previous generation Intel® Xeon(R) 7300 Processors. The performance increase can largely be attributed to designing the Xeon® 7400 processor with 6 cores based on the Intel® Core™ Microarchitecture. In addition, the primary reason for the power decrease is because Xeon® 7400 uses the latest 45nm High-K process technology instead of 65nm in the previous generation. In general, processors based on the 45nm process consume less power than the processor's rated TDP (thermal design power) value. It must be noted that power consumption can vary by processor and some processors may consume even less power and others may consume up to the processor's rated TDP value. For more details on both the performance and power, I recommend taking a look at this 3rd party review by Anandtech*: http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3414&p=1

Next, let's discuss the positive impact these servers can have on your data center. Whether you have an existing data center or plan to build a new one, there is always a fixed amount of power that is provided to that data center. Energy efficient performance, in it's simplest definition, is the ratio of performance in relation to the amount of power consumed. The higher the ratio, the more energy efficient your data center is. To accomplish this, two vectors need to be considered. The first is performance output and the second is power consumption (both when servers are operating at peak performance and when they are running at lower utilization levels or at idle). Servers based on the Intel® Xeon® 7400 processor can provide both higher performance as well as lower power, which offer some very compelling energy efficiency benefits. For example, when using virtualization multiple applications that currently run on independent servers can be consolidated on fewer, higher performing servers, while still providing performance headroom for future growth. By doing this, both acquisition and ongoing electricity/operational costs can be dramatically reduced. To see how much money you can potentially save by upgrading to servers based on the Intel® Xeon® 7400 processor, take a look at the ROI using the Intel® Xeon® Server Estimator at www.intel.com/go/xeonestimator

In summary, the best energy efficient performance can achieved using servers with Intel® Xeon® 7400 Processors. These servers provide both exceptional performance across a wide range of applications, with headroom to grow, while at the same time consuming less power as compared to previous generation Intel 7300 based servers.

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• Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

The following are some considerations prior to tuning your MP Xeon 7400 series server. I can speak to this subject as I was asked to tune this system using the TPC-C and TPC-E benchmarks for internal measurements at Intel. While you may not be setting up thousands of hard disk spindles for your performance work, this blog post attempts to capture some of the key tuning considerations of this Xeon-based server.

Understand your system

The key to tuning any system, whether it is a formula one race car (I promise to stay away from silly car performance analogies) or a server is to understand it. Identify what components have an effect on performance and what components don't. This will narrow down your tuning efforts.

Architecture

Like all of Intel's platforms, an MP Xeon 7400 series server is made of several ingredients. Of course since I work for Intel I need to start out the ingredient list with the central processor. Our website has a good description of this processor here The MP Xeon 7400 processor is made up of three Core 2 Duo T5000/T7000 series processors. This provides six (yes six) cores for processing goodness. Each of the Core 2 Duo T5000/T7000 series processors provide 2 32KB level 1 caches (1 for data and 1 for code) and a 3MB level 2 unified cache. In addition to these two levels of cache the MP Xeon 7400 processor provides a 16MB level 3 unified cache. The other major ingredient to this platform is the Intel® 7300 Chipset. This chipset provides four independent front side bus links to the four CPU sockets. In addition, this chipset provides a snoop filter and four channels of FBD memory.

If some is good, then more is better:

The key thing to take away here is that an MP Xeon 7400 system fully populated with top bin processors will provide a whopping 24 cores of processing power in a four socket system. This is great for the enterprise benchmarks I use for performance testing as those applications are multithreaded and designed for multi-core processors. The same may not be true for your application, so please keep that in mind.

Another thing to remember is that an MP Xeon 7400 processor's design follows a growing pattern in the Xeon processor family. Specifically, I am referring to the addition of the level 3 cache (L3). This is also known as the last level cache (LLC). This follows the design of the Potomac (Xeon MP 64-bit) and Tulsa (7100-series) processors. The value of the large LLC is that it reduces the number of cache misses that would require the machine to go to FBD memory for the latest copy of a cache line. This additional level of on-chip cache comes at a price, though: higher latency. While the latency penalty is relatively low when compared to the latency to memory it is important to mention it here. Again, the LLC greatly benefits enterprise benchmarks I use for performance testing as they have a large memory footprint. The same may not be true for your application.

BIOS / Firmware / Drivers

It is very important to remember to update your system's BIOS, firmware, and OS drivers before you do any deep performance tuning. I can not over state the importance of this step. Your system's manufacturer should be able to provide the latest BIOS and firmware associated with your server. OS drivers are available through many sources these days. Typically these can be downloaded from OS vendors, hardware vendors, from the Linux open source community, or the platform's manufacturer.

Prefetchers

Intel processors have traditionally provided four prefetchers. These are accessible via model specific register IA32_MISC_ENABLE and sometimes via your OEMs BIOS. These features are meant to help the processor load data in a predictive manner to keep the cache hierarchy filled with the most pertinent cache lines. This is great if the application uses data in a somewhat predictable way. If your application uses cache lines in a random fashion, then the prefetchers may negatively impact performance. My best advice for you is to test your application with the prefetchers enabled and disabled. Table B-3 (MSR 0x1A0) in this link covers the prefetchers I am referring to.

Memory Population

As mentioned before, an MP Xeon 7400 series server will provide four channels of FBD memory. There are a couple of considerations here. First, latency to memory increases for every DIMM added to the system. This is important to note because you can keep the memory latency to a minimum by adding fewer high capacity DIMMs. Second, be sure to evenly distribute the DIMMs across all the channels. In other words, don't fill up all the slots on one channel and then lightly populate the rest.

An External Factor that may affect performance

Like many Intel designs, an MP Xeon 7400 series server will choose dishonor over death. I am referring to how it deals with high temperatures. The FBD memory inside an MP Xeon 7400 series server makes use of a thermal monitor on each DIMM. If the memory becomes too hot the chipset will begin to throttle memory bandwidth in an effort to reduce the temperature of the system. This will have a drastic negative impact to performance. So, keep your server room nice and cool.

To wrap things up here, we have looked at the architecture, the importance of BIOS/ firmware/ OS drivers, the prefetchers, memory population, and the effects of high temperatures. Your application's performance will vary, but I hope I have given you some things to narrow down your testing. So, by now you might be asking. "Where do I start?" Well not to be too self serving, but I would check out more of our blog posts here. A great place to start for performance methodologies would be Shannon Cepeda's blog. This series is a great resource for anyone interested in computer performance methodologies.

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