If you've been keeping up with our articles for a while, you might have picked up on vApus Mark I: the virtualized stress test we created for internal use at the Sizing Servers testlab.
As detailed in Johan's article, this bench consists of 3 separate applications, all of which we are very familiar with due to extensive optimization and stress testing efforts. Although we believe the results published based on this bench speak for themselves, the problem remained that it was impossible for anyone outside our lab to verify the results, seeming as how two out of three of the applications used were owned by private companies and were entrusted to our lab under rather strict conditions (distributing them to the rest of the world sadly not being one of them).
Secondly, vApus M1 being a bench that focuses on fairly heavy VM's, we feel the need to create another point of reference. One that will back up the results of the original, but with a completely different mix of VM's.
Thus began the process of creating vApus For Open Source, or vApus FOS, as we like to call it in the lab.
The idea behind vApus FOS is that the VM's can be freely distributed to any vendors that wish to verify our results, and our lab can provide a version of the actual in-house developed vApus benching software to generate the load.
I am happy to say that the preliminary 1-tile testing for this new benchmark has just completed, and so far everything has been running quite smoothly. The results are reproducible, the VM's stable... looks like our 4-tile (16 VM's in total) testing can begin!
The fun part is that a lot of the ideas we incorporated into the new setup we owe to you, our readers! Thanks to the feedback we got on vApus M1, we were able to combine some new workloads into an interesting mix:
As it stands, one tile consists of 4 VM's, all of which run a basic, minimal CentOS 5.4.
VM1 runs an Apache webserver and MySQL database, hosting a phpbb3-forum. The VM is given 2 vCPU's and 1GB RAM.
VM2 runs the same setup as VM1, but is only given 1 vCPU.
VM3 runs a fully configured mailserver using Postfix, Courier and a Squirrelmail frontend. This VM is assigned 2 vCPU's and 1GB RAM.
VM4 runs a separate MySQL OLAP database, using InnoDB as its storage engine. This machine is also assigned 2 vCPU's and 1GB RAM.
The goal is currently to get a 4-tile test going on a 16-core machine, meaning that the hypervisor will have to account for 28 vCPU's in total. This should prove to be a very interesting exercise for the scheduler. Of course, this VM setup can be made to work perfectly fine in an OpenVZ environment as well, meaning we can finally do some real world testing on alternative Linux-based virtualization solutions as well.
We thought we'd keep you updated on the progress of our research. As any experienced IT professional will know, well thought-out server technology testing takes time, and it's important to realize the amount of steps required to produce results that can immediately be applied in the real world.
Stay tuned for our first testing results, they should be rolling in very soon now!
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