Our hands-on testing measured the virtualized OLTP performance of a VMware vSAN cluster comprised of three latest-generation Dell EMC PowerEdge R650 servers, each powered by two 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Gold 6330 processors. Each server had two vSAN disk groups, and we set up each disk group with one NVMe SSD in the cache tier and three NVMe SSDs in the capacity tier. We directly connected all NVMe drives from the backplane to the mother board. The PowerEdge R650 cluster hosted 18 Microsoft SQL Server 2019 VMs (6 VMs per host), against which we ran iterations of an OLTP workload that we created with the benchmarking tool DVD Store 2 (DS2).

We compared the performance of the PowerEdge R650 server-based vSAN cluster to the performance  of PowerEdge R640 and PowerEdge R630 server-based clusters from a previous study that   we  published  in September 2019 (visit http://facts.pt/qnuhaw1).² The configurations of the PowerEdge R640 and R630 solutions contrasted with the PowerEdge R650 solution in the following ways:

• Two Intel Xeon Gold 6230 processors powered each of the three Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 servers. Each server had two vSAN disk groups, and we set up each disk group with one NVMe SSD in the cache tier and three SATA SSDs in the capacity tier. We attached all disks to the storage controller and set them up in pass-through mode.
• Two Intel Xeon E5-2690 v3 processors powered each of the three Dell EMC PowerEdge R630 servers. Each server had two vSAN disk groups, and we set up each disk group with one SATA SSD in the cache tier and two SATA SSDs in the capacity tier. We attached all disks to the storage controller and set them up in pass-through mode.

Both servers from the previous study used 256 GB of RAM and ran vSphere 6.7.

For more information on the server configurations and our testing, see the science behind the report.

About 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors 

According to Intel, 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors are “[o]ptimized for cloud, enterprise, HPC, network, security, and IoT workloads with 8 to 40 powerful cores and a wide range of frequency, feature, and power levels.”³ Intel continues to offer many models from the Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze processor lines, which are aimed at “the most common workload requirements.”⁴

For more information, visit http://intel.com/xeonscalable.

About DVD Store 2

DVD Store 2 simulates customers creating accounts, logging in, searching for items, and placing orders to an ecommerce website. It is available for MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and PostgreSQL databases.

To learn more about OPM and other information specific to our benchmark workloads, visit the DVD Store 2 website at https://github.com/dvdstore/ds21.

About VMware vSphere 7

vSphere is an enterprise compute virtualization program that aims to “deliver a developer ready infrastructure, scale without compromise, and simplify operations.”⁵ This latest version of vSphere integrates VMware Tanzu to allow IT admins and others to bring Kubernetes containers to their organizations’ infrastructure with self-service access.

To learn more about vSphere 7, visit https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/vsphere/vmw-vsphere-datasheet.pdf.

2. Dell EMC, “Dell EMC PowerEdge R650 Spec Sheet,” accessed June 2, 2021, https://www.delltechnologies.com/asset/en-us/products/servers/technical-support/dell-emc-poweredge-r650-spec-sheet.pdf.
3. Intel, “3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors,” accessed May 27, 2021, https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/processors/xeon/3rd-gen-xeon-scalable-processors-brief.html.
4. Intel, “Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors,” accessed May 27, 2021, https://intel.com/xeonscalable.
5. VMware, “VMware vSphere,” accessed June 16, 2021, https://www.vmware.com/content/dam/digitalmarketing/vmware/en/pdf/vsphere/vmw-vsphere-datasheet.pdf.