Benchmark utility for MS server OS
- Thread starter havok
- Start date
Do you mean monitoring or actual benchmark?
Sysinternals provides a lot of monitoring tools that run without installation
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/
Actual benchmark will require 3rd party tools or you have to create your own.
What exactly are you trying to achieve
Sysinternals provides a lot of monitoring tools that run without installation
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/
Actual benchmark will require 3rd party tools or you have to create your own.
What exactly are you trying to achieve
Benchmark to compare physical vs vm servers, so I can see how many vCpu's I can throw at a machine to work out where diminishing returns kicks in for the compute. Looks like this might do https://www.frikiscape.com/rapydmark/
Surely this is massively workload/app dependant and only "real world" testing is going to give you the answer? Like for example if building a server for exchange there is a point with memory where performance falls off of a cliff if you go over the threshold. Can I ask what sort of workloads you are running?
Soldato
As few cores as possible, VMs do not tend to need as much CPU as physical boxes I have found most of our estate has 4 cores at most, even our Exchange farm has either 4 or 6 cores, the reason for using less cores is you can impact performance greatly, as you can get to a point where a VM with say 12 cores assigned to it will need to wait for 12 cores to be free on the physical server due to CPU Scheduling.
From VMWare:
As a guideline, the following vCPU
CPU ratios can be considered a good starting point for a design:1:1 to 3:1 is not typically an issue
3:1 to 5:1, you might begin to see performance degradation
6:1 or greater is often going to cause a significant problem for VM performance
My main estate currently sits around the 3:1 ratio as most of the estate they have applied physical thought processes to the virtual ones, for instance we have a a couple of VMs that have 16 cores assigned to them as that is what their physical versions had, but I can see over time that barely 4 cores is used, so I am in the process of going through and preparing a report to reduce core usage that should bring the overall performance of our cluster up and make it easier when we replace the hardware next year so we can buy less cores to save costs on the new servers and VMWare licencing.
Soldato
Good old rightsizing - then when they inevitably have a problem with their LOB app in 12 months time, and they ignore all the changes they've made and suddenly they blame the fact that they absolutely need 16 cores with no evidence and it needs to be done yesterday and the company has lost over 10,000,000 pounds because of this.
Soldato
Not entirely sure what you are driving at here? Are you suggesting my method is wrong or something else?
I can tell the performance over a year plus on all my VMs so I know how much capacity systems need despite what app vendors and app team tell me, its my job to manage my estate and to arbitrarily give 16 cores to a VM because that is what the app vendor says is a poor way to go about it, as most app vendors do not seem to fully understand virtualisation in my experience.
Soldato
I think you misunderstood my point lol. It was a dig at App Vendors / Product/LOB Owners who when you make changes like this for rightsizing as appropriate to do, they will absolutely always blame Infrastructure/Networking changes before anything else. It was a completely satirical analogy of what I and most people in this position have been through where a component has been rightsized based on evidence and at the first sign of a problem, completely unrelated they will blame the change you made 12 months ago. I don't know, maybe I didn't word it very well.
I also go through the whole process of pain of having non-technical people above me give in to client/customer demands to arbitrarily assign 16 cores to VMs that are utilising single core performance on their badly written app.
Soldato
Ah yes I did sorry if my reply was a bit off, makes sense now what you said
Don't throw vcpu's at a VM in any circumstance. You want to do the exact opposite and give your vm's only what they need (rightsizing).
Giving a vm more than it needs can lead to something called resource contention, which leaves your vm's fighting with each other for access to physical resource on your hypervisor, which in turn causes performance to go down.
There's tools out there you can deploy that will provide some rightsizing data reports. Eg, vrealize operations on a trial for vmware environments, dell foglight, etc.
[edit] Should read more than the op... Would have seen others already mentioning right sizing!
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This is an interesting thread for me as I've been thinking about the same problem but on Linux using KVM rather than Windows Server. I want to know what server spec to order for a virtual machine host and want to get as many virtual machines as possible on the same physical host with as little performance degradation as possible. I was looking at a dual CPU 32 core AMD EPYC server but because this is a new venture I have no idea if this is either over or under kill.
Soldato
Depends on what your VM work load will be, you tend to find RAM is more important on the speccing out of the server as you use more of than than you think. One method we were told was to count up the number of physical cores you have in your physical servers and divide that by 3, that would give you an idea on how many cores you would need on your virtual host, then add more hosts to make the core count make sense. eg if you count up the cores and you have 64 physical cores, you would need 21.3 cores on the host, so you would want probably an 24 core CPU as you need a couple of cores for the virtual OS, but it might be cheaper to get two 16 core CPUs either in dual socket or two hosts.
Bare in mind licensing costs with VWare when you go over 32 physical cores on a the host box you need to buy two CPU licences for it - https://www.vmware.com/company/news/updates/cpu-pricing-model-update-feb-2020.html
Thank you for your reply. I'm trying to go for high-density low specification virtual machines. Linux is perfectly usable on 1 CPU core for basic VPS instances. Of course, I'll offer more core configurations but I imagine the vast majority will go for the cheapest option. It is storage I'm a bit worried about. You can get 3.84TB PCIe Gen 4 SSDs but I don't think I want to use RAID so I'll need a comprehensive backup system in place. Unless there is a PCIe Gen 4 RAID controller card with two M.2 SSD slots (or more) on it.
You should always have both if you like uptime and dislike random restores. If you're running as many VMs as you can fit on the host, you'd be insane not to have RAID.