Optimize your infrastructure with IBM Virtualization Solutions

IBM server optimization and integration servicesVMware server virtualization White Paper

Optimize your infrastructure with IBM Virtualization Solutions

Intel Xeon processor 7500 seriesImpact analysis

2 Optimize your infrastructure with IBM Virtualization Solutions

IntroductionYou ask a lot of your IT systems.And the reality is, to make your business more agile you ask even more. If your IT staff spends all of their time worrying about security, uptime and capacity problems, they won’t be working with you to drive innovation. You need your infra-structure to help you in the marketplace, to help you innovate, to help you be more competitive, to help you succeed.

Today, success demands agility. You need to adjust to changes in your business, from your customers and in the world. IBM offers virtualization solutions with Integrated Service Management that helps your business become more agile. With these solutions, you can:

• Consolidate resources - Improve efficiency and reduce ongoing costs, doing more with less using a selection of virtualization technologies.

• Manage workloads - Reduce IT complexity to make it easier for your staff to support key business priorities.

• Automate processes - Lower management costs and make execution of key tasks more consistent.

• Optimize delivery – Raise service levels so applications can quickly respond to business needs.

Make your business operate smarter.Workloads are growing, data is exploding and memory-inten-sive applications need more than raw processing power. Do you face the challenge of managing a complex server infrastructure that can respond to changing market needs while continuing to reduce your operational costs?

If your existing server infrastructure isn’t optimized, you need the ability to assess, plan, design and implement a dynamic virtualization infrastructure that can meet your current and future business needs.

IBM Server Optimization and Integration services - VMware Server Virtualization is a consulting based solution that helps you determine the optimal placement of workloads within a VMware vSphere infrastructure deployment. IBM employs industry leading assessment technologies such as CiRBA Data Center Intelligence to evaluate workload resource require-ments and hardware platform configurations to achieve an optimized design solution.

Our structured approach and proven methodology are designed to help you consider existing workloads, technology options and business constraints. We provide a business plan, evaluate your current virtualization initiatives and make rec-ommendations to help justify changes that can optimize existing server resources and help reduce operational costs. Our solution aims to help you improve availability and quality of IT services and manage risk effectively.


IBM uses a standardized design methodology to manage infra-structure modification in phases with minimal impact to your operations. This phased approach includes:

Phase 1—Solution Framing. This can include:–Assessing current infrastructure workload and capacity–Evaluating current IT business processes and associated workflows–Detailing the potential operational and economic efficiencies of implement-ing a virtualized server environment

Phase 2—Plan and Design. Your services specialists will develop reference architecture to address findings identified in the solu-tion framing phase. The architecture can include best practices for hardware, virtualization platform, net-working and more.

Phase 3—Implementation and allows for:–Constructing a virtual-ized server infrastructure–Developing a process to manage the new infrastructure–Installing tools and developing workflows to migrate your applications. This phase concludes with client acceptance testing for services specialists to validate that tech-nical specifications are met. IBM also offers optional services for post implementation support, such as monthly health checks and full remote management services.

We provide a business plan, evaluate your current virtualization initiatives and make recommendations to help justify changes that can optimize existing server resources and help reduce operational costs.

This paper uses the methods and tools embodied in the VMware server virtualization offering to evaluate the potential impact of the new Intel Xeon processor 7500 series on the effi-ciency of typical IT environments. The CiRBA Data Center Intelligence analysis engine has been used to evaluate the bene fits of performance increase over previous generations’ of Intel processors, advances in power efficiency and improve-ments in memory architecture using a real-world production environment as context for this comparison. This has been accomplished by comparing the estimated physical-to-virtual consolidation ratios for various “what-if” scenarios based on several recent generations of Intel Xeon processors.


Impact analysisAnalysis results are shown in terms of VM (virtual machine) density (VM-to-host ratios) for each scenario, using CPU and memory as constraints. Disk I/O, network I/O, and context switching were not enabled in these analyses as they are either OEM-dependent, con-figuration dependent or have equal influence on all scenarios, thus not contributing to comparative results.

Environmental analysisThe environment being analyzed was modeled using detailed configuration, utilization and business data collected from an actual production environment and had the below-referenced general attributes.

• 554 Physical servers running a variety of production 24-7 workloads including web, database or infrastructure

• A mixture of Microsoft® Windows® Server OS versions• A mixture of workload sizes and profiles, with around ten

percent of the servers being CPUs• Intensive and ten percent higher memory consumers

Figure 1. Environment breakdown by logical CPU count


The relative performance increases were analyzed for consolidation scenarios onto four types of four-socket servers based on different processor and memory configurations.

The analysis consisted of physical-to-virtual (P2V) workload placement analysis for the VMware vSphere virtual machine manager (VMM) using the following analysis parameters:

• No upper or lower limit on VM density• Busiest day algorithm for representative day selection• Balanced 3rd/4th quartile scorecarding• SPEC CINT2006 rate 2 are used for CPU normalization

(estimated for Intel Xeon X75602)• Soft 80 percent limit on CPU and memory usage, hard 100

percent limit• One percent contention risk tolerance (for example, “99

percent confidence”)• 15 percent VM overhead coefficient• EPT overhead reduction not modeled (see section below)• Intel Turbo Boost Technology• Power consumption estimation mode (prorated using CPU

usage and rated draw)• No business constraints• No process, security or compliance constraints• No application tier or interconnect-related placement policies• No hypervisor-specific candidate qualification rules• No N+1 or percentage HA reservation holdback

Processor codename cores and chip memory release dates

• Xeon 7150N Tulsa 2 64GB Q1 2007• Xeon X7350 Tigerton 4 256GB Q3 2007• Xeon X7460 Dunnington 6 256GB Q3 2008• Xeon X7560 Nehalem EX 8 1TB Q2 2010

Figure 2. Relative consolidation rations for different processor generation


Using this methodology, data from several production environ-ments were analyzed, including both physical and virtual, to determine the general range of improvement between genera-tions. Comparing the Intel Xeon X7560 to the Xeon X7460 based servers, the findings showed a 2.2 to 2.8 times increase in VM density in real-world environments. For the environment shown in this paper, the improvement was 2.75x.

Relative consolidation ratios for different processor generationsIncreases in average CPU utilization were significant in all scenarios, with the scenario employing the Intel Xeon proces-sor 7500 series-based servers showing a slightly higher average. This effect is likely due to the larger space of contiguous capac-ity, which provides workloads more opportunity for “dovetailing”, thus driving a higher average for the same peak utilization level. Contention probability also causes a nonlinear effect as VM densities increase, reducing the likelihood of “per-fect storm” peak alignment, and thus enabling higher average utilization for the same risk tolerance value. In this scenario, a one percent contention tolerance was specified, which means VM densities were capped at a point where there was a one percent probability that utilization spikes would coincide in such a way as to exceed the upper utilization limit. For more information on contention risk analysis please refer to CiRBA’s white paper: “Advanced Workload Analysis Techniques. CPU Utilization—before and after consolidation onto Intel Xeon processor 7400 series-based servers.”

Figure 3. CPU Utilization – before and after consolidation onto Intel® Xeon® processor 7400 series-based servers

Figure 4. CPU Utilization – before and after consolidation onto Intel® Xeon® processor 7500 series-based servers


Power efficiencyPower draw measurements were performed to determine the fixed and variable power draw coefficients used to estimate the power consumption of Intel Xeon processor 7500 series-based servers. It should be noted that these were performed against white-box hardware, and results may vary with OEM systems due to variations in design. In general, the overall per-server power draw was found to be slightly higher than for servers based on previous generation processors (particularly in fully-populated memory configurations). Given the relative performance increase, however, this still translated into a significant drop in aggregate power consumption when consol-idating a given set of workloads onto servers based on the Intel Xeon processor 7500 and 7400 series, respectively.

• Power consumption before consolidation• Power consumption after consolidation onto Intel Xeon

processor 7400 series-based servers• Power consumption after consolidation onto Intel Xeon

processor 7500 series-based servers

Figure 5. Power consumption before consolidation

Figure 6. Power consumption after consolidation onto Intel® Xeon® processor 7400 series-based servers

Figure 6. Power consumption after consolidation onto Intel® Xeon® processor


In this case, the aggregate power consumption of the eight Intel Xeon processor 7500 series-based systems was 51 percent lower than for the 22 Intel Xeon processor 7400 series-based servers. Power consumption testing was performed both with and with-out Intel Turbo Boost Technology enabled, with the expected effect of reducing per-server power draw but also limiting capacity for peak processing requirements. Although useful for tailoring this platform to specific optimization criteria, it did not have a significant impact on the overall consolidation ratios.

Testing was also performed on the idle power characteristics by enabling/disabling the “CPU C State” BIOS setting, thus enabling/preventing the “idle-out” of CPU cores. This was shown to create a 60W difference in power consumption, but because the environment analyzed had a 24x7 operational window, this effect of this was not observed in this case. For environments with higher time-of-day variability this feature can be maximized by concentrating VMs on fewer servers during off hours, thus promoting idle-out.

Memory architectureThe third observed area of impact was in the memory architecture. Although the Intel Xeon processor 7500 series architecture provides a significant increase in processing performance, it provides an even bigger increase in memory capacity. This higher memory-to-processor ratio is well suited to memory constrained virtualization scenarios. Analysis of this effect was performed by targeting the subset of the envi-ronment that had the highest memory consumption relative to CPU activity. These “high memory consumers” were analyzed against the same four target architectures.

• Relative consolidation ratios for memory-intensive workloads

• Intel Xeon processor 7400 series-based servers: CPU is slightly underutilized due to memory limitation

Figure 7. Relative consolidation ratios for memory-intensive workloads

Of note in this analysis is that the scenario consolidating onto the Intel Xeon processor 7400 series-based servers is memory constrained, as the VM density is limited by the maximum memory capacity. In contrast, the Intel Xeon processor 7300 and 7500 series-based servers both have higher relative memory to processing capacity, and thus were CPU constrained. This caused a 4x density increase on the 7500 series-based servers when compared to the 7400 series-based servers, as the density is tracking the memory capacity, not processing performance. When drilling into the CPU and memory utilization in each case, this bias can be observed.


Intel Xeon processor 7500 series-based servers: CPU and memory are more balancedAs was noted earlier, the relative impact of Intel Extended Page Tables (EPT) was not factored into these analyses. EPT is supported by the Intel Xeon processor 7500 series but not in previous generation processors. In general, this type of advancement manifests itself as a decrease in the virtualization overhead between generations. This effect was not represented in this analysis purely due to a lack of verifiable overhead coefficients for the pre-release hardware. It is expected that this feature will result in an increase in VM density, but the amount is highly dependent on hypervisor-specific overhead as well as the memory use profiles of the workloads.

ConclusionIBM Virtualization Services combine the power of CiRBA Data Center Intelligence analytics and IBM eX5 enterprise systems hardware, featuring the Intel Xeon processor 7500 series to deliver solutions designed to help your business be more agile.

With the Intel Xeon processor 7500 series, IBM eX5 can pro duce significant improvements in consolidation ratios and power consumption savings over previous technologies. It also has the flexibility to address multiple operational criteria in a single platform, by supporting configurations that have high CPU performance, high memory capacity, and high power efficiency. As virtualization drives ever deeper into production, these attributes will undoubtedly prove very beneficial.

Learn more about IBM Virtualization solutions at: ibm.com/systems/itsolutions/virtualization/

Learn more about IBM eX5 architecture at: ibm.com/systems/info/x86servers/ex5/

Figure 8. Intel® Xeon® processor 7400 series-based servers – CPU is slightly underleveraged due to memory limitation

Figure 9. Intel® Xeon® processor 7500 series-based servers - CPU and memory are more balanced


About IBMIBM (International Business Machines Corporation) is one of the world’s oldest and foremost computer technology and IT consulting corporations. Based in Armonk, New York, IBM is a global leader at providing IT hardware, software and consult-ing services to businesses, tailored for specific industries. As one of the largest and most profitable IT solutions providers worldwide, it holds more patents than any other company in the United States. IBM scientists, engineers and consultants have received five Nobel Prizes, four Turing Awards, five National Medals of Technology and five National Medals of Science. Some of its notable achievements include having built the world’s fastest supercomputer (the first to operate faster than one quadrillion calculations per second) in 2008 at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and it ranked 12th on the EPA’s list of Green Power Partners for 2007 for it’s participation in the EPA’s Fortune 500 Green Power Challenge. For more informa-tion on IBM or on its virtualization solutions with Integrated Service Management, visit : ibm.com

About Intel XeonIntel (NASDAQ: INTC), the world leader in silicon innova-tion, devel ops technologies, products and initiatives to advance how people work and live. The Intel Xeon® Processor Series is a smart investment as it offers intelligent performance, flexible virtualization and features that can allow you to consolidate your data center and save money. With the largest performance leap in Xeon processor history, the 7500 series pushes mission critical support into the mainstream with scalable per formance and advanced reliability features. The Xeon 5600 series is the next generation of intelligent server processors; it regulates power consumption and intelligently adjusts server perfor-mance based on your application needs. Visit: intel.com/server

About CiRBA Inc.CiRBA is a leading provider of Data Center Intelligence (DCI) software that enables leading systems integrators and Global 5000 organizations to safely maximize efficiency through the intelligent planning and management of physical and virtual infrastructure. Only CiRBA’s policy-driven, multi-dimensional analytics answer the questions of where to place workloads and how to allocate and configure resources. For more information, visit cirba.com.


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1 (SPEC and SPEC cpu2006 are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. The SPEC CPU benchmark values used in the analyses were based on 4-CPU socket IBM® servers and reflect results published on www.spec.org as of March 21, 2010. For the latest SPEC cpu2006, visit http://www.spec.org/cpu2006.

2 Due to pre-release nature of this analysis, no official benchmark numbers were avail-able at time of writing. Figures used were derived from Intel internal testing numbers as well as independent performance measurements performed in CiRBA Labs.)

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