VMware benchmark tool raises fairness questions
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The vendor counters that it is working with industry standards groups to ensure VMmark is impartial and not set up to give VMware an unfair advantage.
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When Fully buffered DIMMs attack A recent benchmark comparing quad-core chips asserts that Intel Xeon-based servers have an edge in performance but are complete power hogs when compared to the dainty energy appetite of AMD Opteron-based servers.â¦
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With new rankings due soon, SGI, IBM and others are jostling for bragging rights. Also: A speedy Mac system gets speedier.
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In a new entry on his blog today, Marco Tabini introduces us to 5 PHP Performance Tips that we "probably don't want to hear".   I thought it might be interesting to write an article about the performance-enhancing tips you probably don't want to hear about - that is, those that are most likely to produce measurable (and durable) results but do require some effort on your part.   His list consists of:  You Don't Need To Plan Ahead In Order To Have A Plan Combat Database Abuse Do You Really Need A Database Anyway? Scale Horizontally Refactor To Scale Vertically  For each, he explains the title and gives a bit of validation to the point. There's some great mentions of tools that you can use to help accomplish them too - a profiler, the Lucene and Xapian full-text databases, and Lustre.
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Software vendor mulls how to compensate Chinese comupter users effected by a buggy antivirus update last week.
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Back in February, Ralph Green asked me to speak at the North Texas Linux Users' Group. I discussed Linux administration and then took questions. Some one in the audience asked me about Mono. I gave a cavalier answer having a bias against it. Then someone else in the audience said that I needed to get my facts straight.
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VMware offers its app free, but competitors ask whether it treats all virtualization products equally.
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The trials and tribulations of application dependency in a virtualized, hosted world.
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While developers are naturally curious over tweaks to the Longhorn road map, many IT administrators barely take notice. Enterprise IT customers typically lag at least
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A new product from Swarmcast monitors data flow to optimize video quality.
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(InfoWorld) - Like other adopters of server virtualization, Purdue University was concerned that its datacenter would hit the wall, exceeding physical space, power, and cooling limits. The use of EMC VMware let it combine 140 physical servers into three Hewlett-Packard DL-585 servers, a 40:1 compression ratio, says Mike Rubesch, director of IT infrastructure systems. "It helps postpone the inevitable," he adds. But the first servers chosen had very low utilization -- around 5 percent -- so the 40:1 rate is not sustainable. Over time, Rubesch expects the ratio to be 6:1, taking into account such servers as e-mail, database, and telephony that cannot be virtualized. That utilization rate will still reduce overall power usage to 16 percent of what it had been and physical space needs to a tenth, as the use of blade servers plus virtualization greatly reduces the physical footprint. Facilities costs should fall by $75,000 per year and hardware costs by $250,000 per year, he says. But organizations considering the use of virtualization need to be careful calculating costs, Rubesch cautions. If you have fewer than 10 virtual server instances running on a physical VMware server, virtualization becomes "extraordinarily expensive," he says. IT managers must also be careful not to factor in too much savings for the operating systems and applications running in virtual machines, Rubesch says. Many IT managers count on being able to run multiple instances of an OS or an app on one CPU, paying for just one license, because most enterprise apps are licensed on a per-CPU basis. But vendors are starting to charge per instance, not per CPU. For example, BEA now charges per instance rather than per CPU for its WebLogic server, and Microsoft Windows Server Enterprise Edition's license allows use on one physical server and as many as four VMs on that server. As virtualization grows more popular, you can expect the licensing savings to evaporate, so the investment should be based on savings elsewhere, such as in hardware and facilities efficiencies, Rubesch says. The use of VMs also increases your risk, because "you can put a lot of eggs in one basket," Rubesch says. But because you've reduced the number of points of failure, IT staff has more capability to focus on those critical areas, he notes. Rubesch is building sufficient capacity so that no single server is fully utilized, providing space for EMC's VMotion software to move VMs if a physical server fails. He's also keeping a spare physical server ready to go if needed. Using virtualization also incurs a high up-front cost. "The benefits aren't immediate," Rubesch says. A big reason is that to use the EMC VMotion utility to move server instances to other physical servers for better load-balancing or failover requires that all the hardware use the same CPU family, requiring a big hardware cost at each refresh cycle. "You need to sell that concept a little bit," he says dryly. Beyond the hardware costs, the use of virtualization makes the server environment more complicated, as "servers" can reside anywhere and change where they reside over time. As a result, "you need more skills," Rubesch says. For example, although a good Windows administrator will easily adapt to running virtualized Windows servers, you still need a dedicated person to handle such items as dynamic allocation and failover, he says. Of course, you can also use virtualization to simplify your environment, Rubesch notes, such as having standard server images that ensure consistency -- ending the nightmare of navigating the peculiarities specific to each hand-deployed physical server. "It's a lot simpler with VMs to have them nearly identical." Despite the caveats on understanding actual savings and the increased up-front costs, Rubesch is a big fan of server virtualization: "You get real benefit from it -- as long as you plan ahead." Virtualization special report Case study: Credit Suisse Case study: Nationwide Insurance Case study: Stonebridge Bank Case study: Transplace
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Paul Jones has posted a teaser concerning his talks(s) at the upcoming php|works conference this year. One is about organizing your applications to make them easier to maintain and work better and the other is a follow up to some previous benchmarks he created comparing several of the popular PHP frameworks.   About The Benchmarking Talk - Easy one-liner: "Statistical Histories for Fun and Profit." And I do mean profit: the better your apps runs on a given stack, the more eyeballs you get on your ads (or, the more users you can handle).   He will be talking about why benchmarking your app is important, how to benchmark a framework and, the thing everyone's waiting for - his benchmark stats comparing several popular frameworks.   Paul also requests that, if possible, one developer from the teams of each of the other frameworks (besides Solar of course) could be in attendance to critique the talk and help point out issues either with the talk or in his methods.
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(InfoWorld) - The president of virtualization software leader VMware Wednesday questioned the strategy of rivals that are integrating virtualization functionality into their operating systems. Diane Greene made the comments at the third and final day of the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco. VMware, a subsidiary of storage vendor EMC, doubled revenue in EMC's latest quarterly report, compared to the year ago quarter, as enterprises embrace VMware's virtualization software to make more efficient use of the servers in their data centers. RivalsÂ like Red Hat and Microsoft have responded to VMware's dominance by integrating virtualization into coming new operating systems. Red Hat is introducing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 next week, and Microsoft's new Windows server OS is due later this year. But Greene, in discussing virtualization with analysts for the investment firm, said she wonders how effective the competition's virtualization features can be. "Traditionally, the operating system manages the hardware and manages the application. Once you virtualize with a hypervisor, that is now what is managing the hardware, not the OS," Greene said, in a presentation that was distributed via webcast. "Now the operating system is just managing the application. So certainly Windows and Red Hat are moving to integrate virtualization into their OS, but part of the value proposition seems to be lost when you do that." Spokespeople for Microsoft and Red Hat did not respond to requests for comment. VMware is a strong contributor to the earnings of parent company EMC, which also sells storage hardware and security software. Greene also is executive vice president of EMC. Revenue for VMware increased to $232 million in the fourth quarter of 2006, 101 percent more than a year prior. The growth comes from increased demand for VMware Infrastructure 3, a virtualization software suite for servers and storage networks. VMware's growth prompted EMC to recently announce plans toÂ spin off 10 percent of VMware in an IPO. EMC executives said they anticipate releasing the prospectus later this month for the IPO, expected about midyear. Greene noted the stock sale will benefit VMware employees as well as potential shareholders. "Our stock-based compensation will track our performance, and that is the ideal model," she said. Also at the Morgan Stanley conference, Greene acknowledged that virtualizing servers, which helps them use more of their designed capacity, may suppress server sales growth. But she said many customers are upgrading servers as they introduce virtualization into their operations. Those new servers are more high-end products, with greater processing power, and should yield higher margins for server vendors. EMC reported fourth quarter 2006 financial results Jan. 23, posting net income of $389 million, or $0.17 a share, on revenue of $3.21 billion. It edged out analysts' estimates of $0.16 a share. Â
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Hoping to keep the heat on archrival Microsoft, VMware on Wednesday will give developers a glimpse of an early version of its Virtual SMP product that allows a single virtual machine to work with as many as four processors, which in turn can more effectively drive mission-critical applications.
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(Source: VMWare) Download this IDC white paper and learn more about how VMware is changing traditional desktop deployment and management.
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(InfoWorld) - While many IT shops see virtualization as a question of adopting EMC's VMware on servers running Windows or Linux, Nationwide Insurance has adopted the technology for both x86-based and mainframe-hosted servers. After all, notes Buzz Woeckener, the company's zLinux/Unix server manager, virtualization was invented for mainframes. On the x86 server side, Nationwide reached 5,000 servers two years ago, running all sorts of departmental applications, notes Scott Miggo, vice president of technology solutions. "We were growing at a steady pace, so we wanted to control the server space and the costs for new development," he says. "A lot of our servers had only a 10 percent utilization rate," he notes, wasting much of the server capacity. Roughly half are production application servers and half are test-and-development servers. Today, there are 3,500 physical servers in operation but still 5,000 instances under management. The VMware servers typically host a dozen instances per physical server. "We assume every new server or application can be virtualized," Miggo says. He expects to have more than 1,000 virtual servers running on 89 physical servers by 2009. His team works to tweak I/O requirements or settings for virtual servers that may have trouble supporting I/O needs in their default state, and it works with vendors to support VMs where possible, before falling back to dedicated servers. Lotus Notes and database applications are examples of where the I/O requirements make virtualization not an option. Although it's easier to deploy servers in a virtual environment by using predefined images, "our staffing has stayed pretty much the same," Miggo says, because the same number of servers must still be monitored. The slight reduction in management overhead is offset by the need for VMware experts to manage the VMware environment, in addition to the server instances. And Nationwide learned the hard way that it needs to monitor both its virtual and physical servers, then correlate the two to identify potential trouble spots, Miggo says. Not doing so can make diagnosis hard, since a VM issue may be caused by a physical issue that a server monitor application running in only the VM won't detect. There's also more overhead needed for Miggo's shared-services group to coordinate all users (such as developers and application managers) of a physical server, as changes to the physical server could affect them all -- and because adjustments to one VM's application mix could affect I/O and other physical server performance characteristics. "We now have to coordinate with 12 users," Miggo says. "People were used to having their own boxes and doing their own thing. Now they're more tightly controlled, which they don't like. But they have to follow control processes like code management and release management since what they do could affect others," he notes. The use of EMC's VMotion software to load-balance and failover VMs across physical servers might reduce management, but the insurer is still exploring that technology. One barrier: Its requirement that all server instances run on physical servers with the same CPU family, requiring a consistent server pool to be in place. Nationwide runs its Web servers in a zLinux environment on IBM zSeries mainframes, supporting 650 guest operating systems (VMs) today, with space for another 650 before additional hardware frames would be needed. Often, using z/VM to support the virtualized Web servers requires a different strategy than using VMware to support virtualized Windows servers, Woeckener notes. For example, you might add memory, CPUs, or network cards to increase I/O on a VMware server. On a zSeries, the CPUs just handle executables, offloading physical I/O (such as network bandwidth and resource scheduling) to dedicated processors, so you don't need to worry about performance-sapping overhead incurred by server resource management. Another difference: Increasing heap size can improve performance in a Windows application but also degrade it in a zLinux application, Woeckener says. That's because Linux steals resources wherever it can find them, so any extra heap space is used by Linux for its own purposes, degrading application performance. When the heap size is reduced, Linux seeks resources elsewhere, giving the full heap to the application and improving performance. In both the VMware and z/VM environments, the ease of deploying new virtual servers has led Nationwide to align demand with real needs, as well as to encourage the use of VMs rather than physical servers. Virtual Windows servers cost a requestor $750 per month versus $2,000 per month for a physical server. And zLinux VMs add a per-MIP rate for weekday usage exceeding 15 MIPs. This overage charge steers batch processing to overnight and weekend periods, when overall demand is less, and forces developers of applications in use during the business day to optimize for performance, saving datacenter resources at the same time. Virtualization special report Case study: Credit Suisse Case study: Purdue University Case study: Stonebridge Bank Case study: Transplace
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The benchmark consists of three workloads designed to demonstrate the performance of a storage configuration during the execution of business-critical applications that require large-scale, sequential movement of data. The