Intel Xeon 5600 CPUs reduce VMexit latency by 12% compared to Nehalem processors
Yesterday Intel launched its new quad-core/hexa-core Xeon 5600 CPU series (codename Westmere).
The always amazing AnandTech already published an extensive review, including some very interesting benchmarks, measured on VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V with VMmark and vApus Mark I frameworks.
First of all, some of the new processors have six cores,: X5650, X5660, X5670 and X5680, as well as the L5638, L5640 and the E5645. Additionally, the new silicon supports up to 288GB DDR3 RAM @ 1066Mhz.
This obviously helps to increase the VMs / core density in virtualization hosts, assuming there are no additional bottlenecks.
More importantly, Westmere CPUs decrease latency of VMs and the hypervisor transitions (VMexit) by 12% compared to Xeon 5500 (codename Nehalem) CPUs, and 50% compared to Xeon 5400 (codename Penryn) CPUs:
AnandTech reports that also the Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB), a CPU cache used for virtualization, has been improved:
With many VMs running on top of a hypervisor, flushing the TLB each time you switched to another VM or to the hypervisor was a costly operation. So the TLBs of the AMD Barcelona cores got a new VM specific tag, called the Address Space IDentifier (ASID). An ASID field was added to each TLB tag. Intel followed this example more than a year later with its Nehalem CPU. The ASIDs allow the TLB to keep track of which TLB entry belongs to which VM. The result is that a VM switch does not flush the TLB.
…
Completely exotic is the support for 1 GB pages. 2 MB instead of 4 KB pages make a lot of sense to avoid overwhelming the TLB. But 1 GB pages seem a bit exaggerated until we count our internal RAM in TBs. I was told that a few very exotic HPC applications would be sped up with this.
Benchmarks are extremely interesting too.
The new Intel Xeon X5670 was measured against Xeon 5500 CPUs and AMD Opteron processors using VMware VMmark, while serving 120 virtual machines on vSphere 4:
AnandTech even tested against its own, independent benchmark framework called vApus Mark I, launched in May 2009.
Because this platform is not subject to the non-competitive constrains that VMware has in its EULA, AnandTech was able to use it to compare Hyper-V and vSphere:
 |
 |
This is the first time ever the publication discloses benchmarks about Hyper-V.
The review, which is a highly recommended reading, ends with a rather interesting conclusion:
Running 8 very heavy VMs requiring 24 virtual CPUs runs still best on the Intel Xeon on ESX. When it comes to Hyper-V, the difference is a lot smaller. So for those of you who want to consolidate on Hyper-V, we would advise you to wait a few more weeks. Octal cores from Intel and AMD and twelve-cores from AMD will make the next server CPU comparison much more tense.
virtualization.info Newest articles
December 20th, 2011
Oracle has released version 4.1.8 of its virtualization platform VM VirtualBox. This version which can be considered a maintenance release can be installed on top of any VM VirtualBox 4.1.x…
December 20th, 2011
VKernel, recently acquired by Quest Software has released version 4.5. of its vOperations Suite (vOps). vOperations is a suite of products providing Performance Analysis, Capacity Management, Resource Optimization, Reporting and…
December 7th, 2011
Teradici is the developer of the PC-over-IP (PCoIP) remote desktop protocol, which is leveraged in software (by VMware view) and provided with Teradici hardware solutions which are OEM’ed by several…
December 7th, 2011
Citrix has released a whitepaper titled:"Windows 2008 R2 Optimization Guide For Desktop Virtualization with XenApp 6 / 6.5", the paper which contains 23 pages outlines optimization for XenApp 6 and…
December 6th, 2011
In November Microsoft released a public beta of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) version 6.5. Today Microsoft announced its release, which is the follow-up of version 6.0 which…
December 6th, 2011
Open source vendor Red Hat has released version 6.2 of its Linux distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This version is the follow-up of version 6.1 which was released in May…
December 6th, 2011
Microsoft has released version 3.2 of the Linux Integration Services for its hypervisor Hyper-V. This version is the follow-up of version 3.1 which was released in July this year.
The…
November 29th, 2011
Since its first official release beginning 2009, the Virtual Session Indexer(VSI) has gained popularity as an independent benchmarking tool. One of the projects using the VSI tool is Project Virtual…
November 21st, 2011
VMware has released version 4.1 of its desktop virtualization platform for Apple Mac: Fusion. This release is considered an minor upgrade for version 4.0 which was released in September this…
November 21st, 2011
In September VMware released a new major version of its virtualization platform Workstation 8.0 and in October it released Player 4.0. Now VMware released an update for its virtualization platform…
November 17th, 2011
VMware has released version 4.7 of of its application virtualization solution ThinApp. This version includes the ability to use ThinApp packages in combination with its Software as a Service (SaaS)…
November 17th, 2011
VKernel, provider of performance and capacity management products, has announced its acquisition by Quest Software. VKernel will operate as a independent subsidiary of Quest.
VKernel entered the virtualization market in…
November 16th, 2011
Lanamark has released a new version of its Capacity Planning platform Suite, this version is the follow up of version 2010 which was released in March last year.
Suite 2012…
November 15th, 2011
In November last year, started releasing Solaris 11 Express, the development version eventually leading to the release of Oracle Solaris 11 which was released last week. Solaris is one of…
Copyright © 2003-2012 virtualization.info. All rights reserved.
virtualization.info | cloudcomputing.info | virtualization.tv | Virtualization Congress