Friday, October 29, 2010

JDRF Walk This Sunday

On Sunday I'm going to be walking on my 9-year old's team in the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF) Walk for a Cure.  Since his diagnosis about 2 months ago I have learned alot.

The short summary is that my son, and all other type-1 diabetics, have to check their blood glucose level throughout the day and inject insulin.  For him that means at least 4 injections and 6 finger pricks a day.  Some days it is much more than that.  It also means that he has to closely watch and measure everything he eats.

He has not complained.  He has not asked why me.  He has not said that it isn't fair.

The support that we have received from our friends and family have been amazing. Thank you.  We're all looking forward to the walk.

Todd

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

The Difficultly of Comparing Physical and Virtual Performance

I have the best car, it can go zero to sixty in under 4 seconds.

No, no my car is the best - It can carry seven people.

Wait, mine is better than both of yours - Its gets 40+ MPG.

As a performance guy at VMware I get involved in lots of discussions comparing physical and virtual performance.  What might seem like a simple thing to do can actually be quite difficult to get right, and in many cases it really is like comparing apples and oranges.

In order to get performance tests configured so that the physcial or virtual configurations match, it almost always involves using some settings that you would not normally use if you weren't doing a performance comparison.

Current generation servers commonly have more than eight cores (and the with hyperthreading its double that number for logical cores).  The maximum number of vCPUs that a VM can have today is eight.  This means that the physical system has to be somehow limited to 8 or less to enable a  comparison.  This can be done in BIOS or in the OS or via physical reconfiguration of hardware (removing processors).  It gets more complex when you have to also factor in the architecture of the server.  All new x86 based servers are using NUMA architectures where performance can be affected depending on how an application or VM is or isn't spread across the NUMA nodes.  When you limit a system to a subset of it's processors, you have to consider how this is done in respect to the NUMA nodes.

It also goes the other way as well.  The size of the VM is increased to 8 or 4 vCPUs to be able to compare the performance against physical, but the VM when run in production will be a 1 or 2 vCPU system.  The scalability of the application itself can become the gating factor if it doesn't do as well with more cores.  It is also common to run a single VM on a host for these comparisons.  A single VM on a host doesn't really make a lot of sense in most cases, so this becomes another aspect of the test that isn't reflective of how things will be run in production.

After all of this, it is possible to get a test that allows for a decent comparison if things were done carefully.  The problem is that this isn't how it would actually be run.  While these tests are great for getting a basic idea of performance differences, they don't really take into account the bigger picture of why virtualize in the first place.

It would probably be much better to run a test with your applications in an environment that is as close as possible to how you would run it in production. Base the results and analysis on end user experience or response time measurements.  I know that this is usually not practical to do, which is why we end up doing these other tests.  Just remember to take the constraints of a test into account when looking at results.

If you were buying a car to be able to carry your family of five, with luggage, on vacations every summer then your definition of performance probably won't rely too heavily on 0-60 time (Although we would all probably still want to know what that time was).

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Is This Thing Still On?

I'm tapping on the microphone.  Dust is flying off.  Individual specs picked up in the light coming in from the partially open door.  A faint thud thud.  "Is this thing still on?"

After a very long break of about 3 years, I've decided to pick up blogging here again.  I was blogging only on my work blogs (Virtualization Frontier on delltechcenter.com,Virtualization Edge on VMware communities, and VROOM! on VMware.com)  for the past few years, but that has become too limited.  I'll still be posting on VROOM! which is a great blog, but for things that are less formal or not directly work related I need a different blog.

So here I'm going to continue to mostly blog about virtualization, computers, and geek stuff.  This platform will provide me with better information about traffic, much more more freedom in terms of design and layout, and more flexibility in terms of tools available to post content, than what was possible on the VMware community site.