This post was written by Waseem Raja, an engineer on the Dell Solutions Performance Anaylsis team
I’ve gotten a lot of questions around a VMmark result on the Dell PowerEdge R820. I’m happy to announce that our Solutions Performance Analysis team has produced a VMmark 2.5 result of 19.79 @ 18 tiles on the PowerEdge R820.
The Dell PowerEdge R820 is a high-performance four-socket, 2U rack server, which is designed for dense virtualization and scalable database applications. Our previously published VMmark result was a two-socket result based on the Dell PowerEdge R720. It achieved a score of 11.39 @ 10 tiles. Each tile in VMmark 2.5 represents 8 virtual machines, so we can see that the four-socket R820 was able to sustain 80% more virtual machines than the two-socket R720:
For this result, two PowerEdge R820 servers were each configured with four Intel Xeon E5-4650 processors and 512 GB of memory. The load-driving clients were Dell PowerEdge R410 servers, and they were connected together using Dell Networking switches. The virtual machines were hosted on two Dell PowerEdge R720 servers, each containing three Fusion-io 2.4TB ioDrive2 Duo cards.
This is the first Dell VMmark result to use the Fusion-io ION Data Accelerator as the storage backend. The ION Data Accelerator software transforms industry-leading open server platforms into powerful shared acceleration devices for vertical applications or clusters. Multiple ioDrive2 Duos deliver the same industry-leading low latency, while achieving gigabytes of bandwidth and hundreds of thousands of IOPS with a single server.
We consider this result to be a great example of how an end-to-end Dell solution provides optimal performance for our customers.
VMmark 2.5 is an industry standard benchmark used to measure the performance and scalability of a virtualized environment. It constitutes application-level workloads along with platform-level workloads (vMotion, Storage vMotion and Deploy operation) for a realistic measure of virtualization performance.
For more information on this result, the full disclosure is attached to this blog post.