SERVER CONSOLIDATION AND TCO: DELL POWEREDGE M620 VS. DELL POWEREDGE M710HD When selecting equipment for your virtualized IT infrastructure, two things matter: strong performance to handle the needs of your employees and customers, and keeping costs down. Investing in servers with the latest technology can help you accomplish both.
SAVING THROUGH SERVER CONSOLIDATION One of the biggest advantages of having a virtualized infrastructure is the ability to eliminate much of the hardware that populates a data center. Creating multiple VMs on a powerful new server lets you reduce the number of physical servers you must purchase, house, maintain, license, and power.
As we ran our performance tests, we measured the power that the servers used. As Figure 2 shows, the new Dell PowerEdge M620 with Intel Xeon processor E5-2660s was more power efficient than the previous-generation server, with 2.1 percent greater performance per watt. Performance/watt shows how many orders per minute correspond with each watt of power; higher numbers are better.
make it a more cost-efficient solution over three years. For detailed information on how we arrived at these costs, see Appendix C.
Figure 5 shows the savings that the two Dell PowerEdge M620 servers deliver compared to the three Dell PowerEdge M710HD servers over three years in our consolidation scenario. Savings equal as much as $8,093.49, or 8.3 percent of the cost of the Dell PowerEdge M710HD solution. The Dell PowerEdge M620 solution delivers $8,093.49 savings over three years $120,000 $100,000 US Dollars Figure 5: The Dell PowerEdge M620 solution can deliver savings of $8,093.49, or 8.
About DVD Store Version 2.1 To create our real-world ecommerce workload, we used the DVD Store Version 2.1 (DS2) benchmarking tool. DS2 models an online DVD store, where customers log in, search for movies, and make purchases. DS2 reports these actions in orders per minute (OPM) that the system could handle, to show what kind of performance you could expect for your customers.
VMs running no workloads % CPU Power (W) utilization Dell PowerEdge M620 Dell PowerEdge M710HD All VMs running workloads % CPU Power (W) utilization Performance/ watt Performance/ watt % win 2.1% 145.4 6.9 339.5 87.8 770.9 182.7 5.4 277.8 86.0 755.3 Figure 7: CPU utilization, power, and performance/watt statistics for the two servers.
APPENDIX A – SERVER CONFIGURATION INFORMATION Figure 8 provides detailed configuration information for the test servers.
System Dell PowerEdge M620 Dell PowerEdge M600 (baseline for consolidation) Dell PowerEdge M710HD Power Management set to OS Control Power Management set to OS Control Default 128 PC3-10600R 1,333 96 Samsung M393B1K70BH1CH9 PC3-10600R 1,333 4 Samsung M395T2953EZ4CE65 PC2-5300F 666 1,333 1,333 666 9-9-9-36 9-9-9-24 5-5-5-15 8 8 1 16 12 4 Double-sided Dual Double-sided Dual Double-sided Dual Name VMware ESXi 5.0.0 VMware ESXi 5.0.
N/A N/A N/A N/A Dell PowerEdge M600 (baseline for consolidation) 10K SAS Broadcom® Gigabit Ethernet BCM57810 Integrated Broadcom NetXtreme II 10 Gigabit Ethernet Mezzanine card Broadcom BCM5708S NetXtreme® II GigE Integrated Broadcom NetXtreme II 10 Gigabit Ethernet Mezzanine card Broadcom NetXtreme II 10 Gigabit Ethernet Mezzanine card N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 2 external, 1 internal 2.0 2 external, 1 internal 2.0 2 external, 1 internal 2.
APPENDIX B – HOW WE TESTED Legacy Dell PowerEdge M600 and Dell EqualLogic PS5000 storage configuration overview Our complete storage infrastructure for our legacy server consisted of two internal drives in the server, an internal RAID controller, an onboard NIC dedicated to iSCSI traffic, and a Dell EqualLogic™ PS5000 storage array. We configured the internal drives on the server in a RAID 1 volume. For external storage, we used a Dell EqualLogic PS5000 array, each containing 16 drives.
7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. Click the Disk, and click Drive options (advanced). Click NewApplyFormat, and click Next. After the installation completes, click OK to set the Administrator password. Enter the administrator password twice, and click OK. Connect the machine to the Internet and install all available Windows updates. Restart as necessary. Enable remote desktop access. Change the hostname and reboot when prompted. Set up networking: a.
8. Click the checkbox to accept the license terms, and click Next. 9. Click Install to install the setup support files. 10. If there are no failures displayed, click Next. You may see a Computer domain controller warning and a Windows Firewall warning. For now, ignore these. 11. At the Setup Role screen, choose SQL Server Feature Installation. 12.
Setting up the external storage 1. Using the command-line console, via serial cable, reset each Dell EqualLogic PS6010 using the reset command. 2. Supply a group name, group IP address, and IP address for the first of two arrays. 3. Reset the remaining array in the same manner, supply the group name to join and the IP address created in Step 2, and supply an IP address in the same subnet for the remaining tray. 4.
2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Using the vSphere client from another machine, connect to the ESXi server. Select the Configuration tab, and select Storage under the Hardware heading. Right-click the OS datastore, and select Browse Datastore. Click the upload button, and select the build update ZIP file. Using a telnet/ssh client from another machine, connect to the ESXi server using root credentials.
6. Access provisioned Dell EqualLogic storage: a. In the vSphere client, click the host, click the Configuration tab, and click Storage adapters. b. Right-click the iSCSI software storage adapter. c. Click Dynamic discovery. d. Click Add. e. Enter the Dell EqualLogic group IP address. f. Click Close. g. Click Yes when prompted to rescan the HBA. Configuring VM networking 1. Using the vSphere client from another machine, connect to the ESXi server. 2.
15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. Keep the default virtual device node (0:0), and click Next. Click Finish. Right-click the VM, and choose Edit Settings. On the Hardware tab, click Add… Click Hard Disk, and click Next. Click Create a new virtual disk, and click Next. Specify 30GB for the virtual disk size, choose thick-provisioned lazy zeroed, and specify the DB datastore. Choose SCSI(1:0) for the device node, and click Next.
a. Click the Server Manager icon in the taskbar. b. In the left pane, expand Storage, and click Disk Management. c. Right-click the first volume, and choose Initialize Disk. d. In the right pane, right-click the volume, and choose New Simple VoIume… e. At the welcome window, click Next. f. At the Specify Volume Size window, leave the default selection, and click Next. g. At the Assign Drive Letter or Path window, choose a drive letter, and click Next. h.
28. Create a SQL Server login for the ds2user (see the Configuring the database (DVD Store) section for the specific script to use). 29. Copy the pre-created DVD Store backup to the specified backup VHD volume. 30. Click StartAll ProgramsMicrosoft SQL Server 2008 R2Configuration Tools, and click SQL Server Configuration Manager. 31. Expand SQL Server Network Configuration, and click Protocols for MSSQLSERVER. 32. Right-click TCP/IP, and select Enable. 33. Close the SQL Server Configuration Manager. 34.
The only modification we made to the schema creation scripts were the specified file sizes for our database. We explicitly set the file sizes higher than necessary to ensure that no file-growth activity would affect the outputs of the test. Besides this file size modification, the database schema was created and loaded according to the DVD Store documentation. Specifically, we followed the steps below: 1.
Logical name Log files ds_log Filegroup Initial size (MB) Not Applicable 10,240 Figure 9: Our initial file size modifications. Editing the workload script – ds2xdriver.cs module A new feature of DVD Store version 2.1 is the ability to target multiple targets from one source client. We used this functionality, and in order to record the orders per minute output from each specific database target, we modified the ds2xdriver to output this information to log files on each client system.
APPENDIX C – TCO CALCULATIONS AND ASSUMPTIONS TCO scenario and model For our TCO analysis, we used the results from our tests to determine how many Dell PowerEdge M620 servers and how many Dell PowerEdge M710HD servers it would take to handle the same 24 database workloads. If three Dell PowerEdge M710HDs support eight VMs each, for 24 VMs, two PowerEdge M620s should handle the same workload, with each server supporting 12 VMs.
Figure 10 shows the software costs for each solution, and the savings available with the Dell PowerEdge M620 solution.
Data center costs We assume that the blade servers fit into 10u chassis that hold up to sixteen half-height blade servers. We divide 10u by 16 to determine the portion of the chassis each blade server requires. We assume a cost of $2,170 per rack for data center space. Each solution uses .6 u per server. The cost is therefore $184.95 total per year for the three servers in the Dell PowerEdge M710HD solution, and $123.30 per year for the two servers in the Dell PowerEdge M620 solution.
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