IBM and Intel Work on Virtualization Benchmark

IBM and Intel Corporation have announced a joint initiative aimed at helping IT managers identify and quantify the value of virtualization in their organization. Specifically, the two are working together on a set of new tools that will help IT managers select, deploy and measure virtualized server solutions for enterprise data centers.

The first tool to emerge from this joint initiative is a new virtualization benchmarking methodology called vConsolidate. It runs multiple instances of consolidated database, mail, Web and Java workloads in multiple virtual CPU partitions to simulate real-world server performance in a typical environment.

The joint benchmark project should be ready for users sometime in the first half of next year. Intel and IBM are contributing the vConsolidate methodology to an industry standards body for consideration. As a side note, VMware is also working on a standardized benchmarking project of its own, dubbed VMmark. The project was discussed at VMworld 2006, and the company hoped to get buy-in from other vendors. The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) announced earlier this month that it too had begun creating a working group to start development on a virtualization benchmarking project.

Boyd Davis, general manager of Intel Server Platform Group Marketing, said “By creating the vConsolidate methodology with IBM, we are helping to make it easier for IT managers to adopt the technology and compare processor platforms and system configurations.”

Interestingly enough, vConsolidate has already been used to measure IBM multiprocessor systems against its competitor’s products. The results showed the x3950 delivers up to 46 percent more performance throughput than a competing system when running a mix of larger two and four virtualized processor partitions.

Based on this and other customer test results, the two companies have created a VMware Infrastructure Sizing Guide that is aimed at helping customers select and appropriately configure the various virtualized server options available to them.

Both the sizing guide effort and the vConsolidate testing results identified memory as a key limiting factor in determining how many virtual machines can be loaded onto an Intel-based server. IBM and Intel researchers have studied the impact of increased addressable memory on virtualization performance. By collecting data from more than 10,000 servers through IBM’s Consolidation Discovery and Analysis Tool, the researchers determined that while virtualization increases total processor utilization, additional reserve memory is required to allow for application usage spikes.

This insight prompted further joint development using the IBM System x3950 as a large memory system reference configuration to increase the total addressable memory pool from 64GB to 128GB. Intel and IBM expect this expanded memory addressability to be supported in the leading virtualization platforms beginning next year.