Comments on: Newer Processors and Virtualization Performance

By: Scott

Scott — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:09:45 +0000

We do not benchmark specific features of microprocessors with the exception of Hyper-threading and virtualization-specific features. So, we do not have anything on HyperTransport.

But, I would expect it to have very little value to our most common benchmark, VMmark. Proper placement of VMs on NUMA nodes would minimize remote memory access and reduce the value of a better internode bus, such as HyperTransport.

But this is just hand waving. We do not have any data.

Scott

By: Anders Gregersen

Anders Gregersen — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:59:57 +0000

Any views on HyperTransport 1 vs 3 in a vmware environment? I’ve been unable to find any performance reference and yet HT3 is usually enabled in benchmarks. Knowing that benchmarks not always reflect real-life workloads I hope you have some insight into what to choose.

By: Scott

Scott — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:24:10 +0000

The turbo mode feature will accelerate the clock speed of one core if others are idle. This way that thread’s performance can be increased while the processor is kept within the TDP.

This functionality happens in the hardware and is transparent to ESX or any OS. Set it or ignore it with any version of ESX–it will not change VMware functionality.

I surmise that the processor will infrequently use turbo mode in consolidated environments where there are many threads distributed across the cores. But this belief is not backed by data.

By: Tomi

Tomi — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 10:33:51 +0000

Scott, do you have insight on how Xeon 5500 turbo mode is utilized with ESX 3.5 and 4.0? Is it OK to have it enabled on ESX server BIOS?