configuration, with the exceptions we note in the Setting up DVD Store section in the How we tested section of this report.

Each client machine ran a single instance of DS2, with 32 threads. This simulated a heavily loaded environment; the load-generating client machines ran with no think time, blasting requests as quickly as the servers could handle them.

The DS2 driver application creates an orders-per-minute performance counter on the client VM. While the DVD Store client application outputs OPM at 10-second intervals visually, we chose to collect this OPM metric by using the last recorded OPM amount displayed by each client. We ran this workload on the both servers’ virtual machines simultaneously for 30 minutes.

For more details about the DS2 tool, see http://www.delltechcenter.com/page/DVD+Store.

SYSTEM COMPARISON

Figure 1 shows a side-by-side comparison of the key hardware differences between the test servers. We used the maximum speed memory supported by both architectures, which is 1,333 MHz (PC3-10600R) for the AMD Opteron 6100 series processor and 1,066 MHz (PC3-8500R) for the Intel Xeon 7500 series processor. Appendix A presents detailed system information.

 

Hardware specifications

 

Dell PowerEdge R815

 

IBM System x3850 X5

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CPU

 

AMD

Intel

 

CPU speed (GHz)

 

2.20

 

2.26

 

 

Number of processor packages

 

4

 

4

 

 

Number of cores per processor

 

12

 

8

 

 

package

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Number of hardware threads per

 

1

 

2

 

 

core

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Memory type

 

PC3-10600R

PC3-8500R

 

Total memory (GB)

 

256

 

256

 

Figure 1: Key hardware differences between the two test servers.

Figure 2 shows the settings we used on the VMs for testing. Refer to the How we tested section below

for detailed steps of how we set up the VMs.

VM specifications

Dell PowerEdge R815

IBM System x3850 X5

Number of vCPUs

1

1

Memory (GB)

5

5

Number of virtual disks

4

4

Figure 2: VM configuration information for the test servers.

Virtualized database performance comparison: Dell PowerEdge

A Principled Technologies test report 3

R815 vs. IBM System x3850 X5