New SPECvirt® Datacenter 2021 Benchmark, for Complex, Multi-Host Environments

By David Schmidt, Virtualization Committee Chair

The SPEC Virtualization Committee has released the SPECvirt® Datacenter 2021 benchmark, a new multi-host benchmark for measuring the performance of a scaled-out datacenter.

While distributed computing has become the dominant infrastructure in datacenters today – providing reliability, availability, serviceability and security – virtualization is the key to optimizing this infrastructure and providing increased flexibility and application availability, while also reducing costs through server and datacenter consolidation. As such, suppliers and buyers require a fair, vendor-agnostic tool for measuring the performance of the solutions they use to power these more complex, multi-host environments.

The SPECvirt Datacenter 2021 benchmark enables analysis of these environments, using real-world and simulated workloads to measure the overall efficiency of virtualization solutions and their management environments. The SPECvirt Datacenter 2021 benchmark is the first new datacenter benchmark since 2013 and represents significant effort on the part of the SPEC Virtualization Committee to reflect the rapidly evolving changing datacenter industry. The SPECvirt Datacenter 2021 benchmark complements the existing SPECvirt_sc 2013 server consolidation benchmark, which is designed for a single-host environment. The SPECvirt Datacenter 2021 benchmark is also easier to use than the SPECvirt_sc 2013 benchmark because it provides a preconfigured virtual machine (VM) template to set up its harness and workloads.

The new benchmark models typical, modern-day usage of virtualized infrastructure, such as VM resource provisioning, cross-node load balancing – including management operations such as VM migrations – and VM power on/off. The benchmark exercises datacenter operations under load and dynamically provisions new workload VMs from the benchmark template or powers on existing VMs. As the load reaches maximum capacity of the active hosts, off-line hosts are enabled in the cluster to measure scheduler efficiency and maximize throughput. The SPECvirt Datacenter 2021 benchmark supports multiple hypervisor vendor solutions and ships with support for RHV 4.x and vSphere 6.x and 7.x.

SPECvirt Datacenter 2021 Benchmark Feature Overview

• Multi-host benchmark – Minimum of four hosts required, scales in increments of four.
• Datacenter operations model – Multi-workload benchmark measures performance of hypervisor infrastructure, including how the hypervisor manager controls resources.
• Five real-world and simulated workloads –
  • OLTP database, based on HammerDB benchmark
  • Hadoop/Big Data cluster, based on BigBench benchmark
  • Simulated departmental mail server
  • Simulated departmental web server
  • Simulated departmental collaboration server
• VM resource management – Handled by the hypervisor manager, including scheduling policies. Workload VMs powered on or deployed during benchmark.
• Ease of use – Single preconfigured template VM to set up harness and workloads. Tuning of guest OS/software controlled by the benchmark harness.

The SPECvirt Datacenter 2021 benchmark is available for immediate download.

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