2nd Gen AMD EPYC now available to power your favorite hyperconverged platform ;) VxRail
Mon, 27 Jul 2020 18:46:53 -0000
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Expanding the range of VxRail choices to include 64-cores of 2nd Gen AMD EPYC compute
Last month, Dell EMC expanded our very popular E Series (the E for Everything Series) with the introduction of the E665/F/N, our very first VxRail with an AMD processor, and what a processor it is! The 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor came to market with a lot of industry-leading capabilities:
- Up to 64-cores in a single processor with 8, 12, 16, 24, 32 or 48 core offerings also available
- Eight memory channels, but not only more channels, they are also faster at 3200MT/s. The 2nd Gen EPYC can also address much more memory per processor
- 7nm transistors. Smaller transistors mean more powerful and more energy efficient processors
- Up to 128 lanes of PCIe Gen 4.0, with 2X the bandwidth of PCIe Gen 3.0.
These industry leading capabilities enable the VxRail E665 series to deliver dual socket performance in a single socket model - and can provide up to 90% greater general-purpose CPU capacity than other VxRail models when configured with single socket processors.
So, what is the sweet spot or ideal use case for the E665? As always, it depends on many things. Unlike the D Series (our D for Durable Series) that we also launched last month, which has clear rugged use cases, the E665 and the rest of the E Series very much live up to their “Everything” name, and perform admirably in a variety of use cases.
While the 2nd Gen EPYC 64-core processors grab the headlines, there are multiple AMD processor options, including the 16 core AMD 7F52 at 3.50GHz with a max boost of 3.9GHz for applications that benefit from raw clock speed, or where application licensing is core based. On the topic of licensing, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention VMware’s update to its per-CPU pricing earlier this year. This results in processors with more then 32-cores requiring a second VMware per-CPU license. This may make a 32-core processor an attractive option from an overall capacity & performance verses hardware & licensing cost perspective.
Speaking of overall costs, the E665 has dual 10Gb RJ45/SFP+ or dual 25Gb SFP28 base networking options, which can be further expanded with PCIe NICs including a dual 100Gb SFP28 option. From a cost perspective, the price delta between 10Gb and 25Gb networking is minimal. This is worth considering particularly for greenfield sites and even for brownfield sites where the networking maybe upgraded in the near future. Last year, we began offering Fibre Channel cards on VxRail, which are also available on the E665. While FC connectivity may sound strange for a hyperconverged infrastructure platform, it does make sense for many of our customers who have existing SAN infrastructure, or some applications (PowerMax for extremely large database requiring SRDF) or storage needs (Isilon for large file repository for medical files) that are more suited to SAN. While we’d prefer these SAN to be a Dell EMC product, as long as it is on the VMware SAN HCL, it can be connected. Providing this option enables customers to get the best both worlds have to offer.
The options don’t stop there. While the majority of VxRail nodes are sold with all-flash configurations, there are customers whose needs are met with hybrid configs, or who are looking towards all-NVMe options. The E665 can be configured with as little as 960GB to maximums of 14TB hybrid, 46TB all-flash, or 32TB all-NVMe of raw storage capacity. Memory options consist of 4, 8, or 16 RDIMMs of 16GB, 32GB or 64GB in size. Maximum memory performance, 3200 MT/s, is achieved with one DIMM per memory channel, adding a second matching DIMM reduces bandwidth slightly to 2933 MT/s.
VxRail and Dell Technologies, very much recognize that the needs of our customers vary greatly. A product with a single set of options cannot meet all our various customers’ different needs. Today, VxRail offers six different series, each with a different focus:
- Everything E Series a power packed 1U of choice
- Performance-focused P Series with dual or quad socket options
- VDI-focused V Series with a choice of five different NIVIDA GPUs
- Durable D Series are MIL-STD 810G certified for extreme heat, sand, dust, and vibration
- Storage-dense S Series with 96TB of hybrid storage capacity
- General purpose and compute dense G Series with 228 cores in a 2U form factor
With the highly flexible configuration choices, there is a VxRail for almost every use case, and if there isn’t, there is more than likely something in the broad Dell Technologies portfolio that is.
Author: David Glynn, Sr. Principal Engineer, VxRail Tech Marketing
Resources:
VxRail Spec Sheet
E665 Product Brief
E665 One Pager
D560 3D product landing page
D Series video
D Series spec sheet
D Series Product Brief
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More GPUs, CPUs and performance - oh my!
Mon, 14 Jun 2021 11:18:50 -0000
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Continuous hardware and software changes deployed with VxRail’s Continuously Validated State
A wonderful aspect of software-defined-anything, particularly when built on world class PowerEdge servers, is speed of innovation. With a software-defined platform like VxRail, new technologies and improvements are continuously added to provide benefits and gains today, and not a year or so in the future. With the release of VxRail 7.0.200, we are at it again! This release brings support for VMware vSphere and vSAN 7.0 Update 2, and for new hardware: 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors (Milan), and more powerful hardware from NVIDIA with their A100 and A40 GPUs.
VMware, as always, does a great job of detailing the many enhanced or new features in a release. From high level What’s New corporate or personal blog posts, to in-depth videos by Duncan Epping. However, there are a few changes that I want to highlight:
Get thee to 25GbE: A trilogy of reasons - Storage, load-balancing, and pricing.
vSAN is a distributed storage system. To that end, anything that improves the network or networking efficiency improves storage performance and application performance -- but there is more to networking than big, low-latency pipes. RDMA has been a part of vSphere since the 6.5 release; it is only with 7.0 Update 2 that it is leveraged by vSAN. John Nicholson explains the nuts and bolts of vSAN RDMA in this blog post, but only touches on the performance gains. From our performance testing on VxRail, I can share with you the gains we have seen with VxRail: up to 5% reduction in CPU utilization, up to 25% lower latency, and up to 18% higher IOPS, along with increases in read and write throughput. It should be noted that even with medium block IO, vSAN is more than capable of saturating a 10GbE port, RDMA is pushing performance beyond that, and we’ve yet to see what Intel 3rd Generation Xeon processors will bring. The only fly in the ointment for vSAN RDMA is the current small list of approved network cards – no doubt more will be added soon.
vSAN is not the only feature that enjoys large low-latency pipes. Niels Hagoort describes the changes in vSphere 7.0 Update 2 that have made vMotion faster, thus making Balancing Workloads Invisible and the lives of virtualization administrators everywhere a lot better. Aside: Can I say how awesome it is to see VMware continuing to enhance a foundational feature that they first introduced in 2003, a feature that for many was that lightbulb Aha! moment that started their virtualization journey.
One last nudge: pricing. The cost delta between 10GbE and 25GbE network hardware is minimal, so for greenfield deployments the choice is easy; you may not need it today, but workloads and demands continue to grow. For brownfield, where the existing network is not due for replacements, the choice is still easy. 25GbE NICs and switch ports can negotiate to 10GbE making a phased migration, VxRail nodes now and switches in the future, possible. The inverse is also possible: upgrade the network to 25GbE switches while still connecting your existing VxRail 10GbE SFP+ NIC ports.
Is 25GbE in your infrastructure upgrade plans yet? If not, maybe it should be.
A duo of AMD goodness
Last year we released two AMD-based VxRail platforms, the E665/F and the P675F/N, so I’m delighted to see CPU scheduler optimizations for AMD EPYC processors, as described in Aditya Sahu blog post. What is even better is the 29 page performance study Aditya links to, the depth of detail provided on how the ESXi CPU scheduling works, and didn’t work, with AMD EYPC processors is truly educational.
The extensive performance testing VMware continuously runs and the results they share (spoiler: they achieved very significant gains) are also a worthwhile read. In our testing we’ve seen that with just these scheduler optimizations AMD alone VxRail 7.0.200 can provide up to 27% more IOPS and up to 27% lower latency for both RAID1 and RAID5 with relational database (RDBMS22K 60R/40W 100%Random) workloads.
VxRail begins shipping the 3rd generation AMD EYPC processors – also known as
Milan – in VxRail E665 and P675 nodes later this month. These are not a replacement
for the current 2nd Gen EPYC processors we offer, rather the addition of higher
performing 24-core, 32-core, and 64-core choices to the VxRail line up delivering up to 33% more IOPS and 16% lower latency across a range of workloads and block sizes. Check out this VMware blog post for the performance gains they showcase with the VMmark benchmarking tool.
HCI Mesh – only recently introduced, yet already getting better
When VMware released HCI Mesh just last October, it enabled stranded storage on one VxRail cluster to be consumed by another VxRail cluster. With the release of VxRail 7.0.200 this has been expanded to making it more applicable to more customers by enabling any vSphere clusters to also be consumers of that excess storage capacity – these remote clusters do not require a vSAN license and consume the storage in the same manner they would any other datastore. This opens up some interesting multi-cluster use cases, for example:
In solutions where a software application licensing requires each core/socket in the vSphere cluster to be licensed, this licensing cost can easily dwarf other costs. Now this application can be deployed on a small compute-only cluster, while consuming storage from the larger VxRail cluster. Or where the density of storage per socket didn’t make VxRail viable, it can now be achieved with a smaller VxRail cluster, plus a separate compute-only cluster. If only the all the goodness that is VxRail was available in a compute-only cluster – now that would be something dynamic…
A GPU for every workload
GPUs, once the domain of PC gamers, are now a data center staple with their parallel processing capabilities accelerating a variety of workloads. The versatile VxRail V Series has multiple NVIDIA GPUs to choose from and we’ve added two more with the addition of the NVIDIA A40 and A100. The A40 is for sophisticated visual computing workloads – think large complex CAD models, while the A100 is optimized for deep learning inference workloads for high-end data science.
Evolution of hardware in a software-defined world
PowerEdge took a big step forward with their recent release built on 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors. Software-defined principles enable VxRail to not only quickly leverage this big step forward, but also to quickly leverage all the small steps in hardware changes throughout a generation. Building on the latest PowerEdge servers we are Reimagine HCI with VxRail with the next generation VxRail E660/F, P670F or V670F. Plus, what’s great about VxRail is that you can seamlessly integrate this latest technology into your existing infrastructure environment. This is an exciting release, but equally exciting are all the incremental changes that VxRail software-defined infrastructure will get along the way with PowerEdge and VMware.
VxRail, flexibility is at its core.
Availability
- VxRail systems with Intel 3rd Generation Xeon processors will be globally available in July 2021.
- VxRail systems with AMD 3rd Generation EPYC processors will be globally available in June 2021.
- VxRail HCI System Software updates will be globally available in July 2021.
- VxRail dynamic nodes will be globally available in August 2021.
- VxRail self-deployment options will begin availability in North America through an early access program in August 2021.
Additional resources
- Blog: Reimagine HCI with VxRail
- Attend our launch webinar to learn more.
- Press release: Dell Technologies Reimagines Dell EMC VxRail to Offer Greater Performance and Storage Flexibility
New VxRail Node Lets You Start Small with Greater Flexibility in Scaling and Additional Resiliency
Mon, 29 Aug 2022 18:38:12 -0000
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When deploying infrastructure, it is important to know two things: current resource needs and that those resource needs will grow. What we don’t always know is in what way the demands for resources will grow. Resource growth is rarely equal across all resources. Storage demands will grow more rapidly than compute, or vice-versa. At the end of the day, we can only make an educated guess, and time will tell if we guessed right. We can, however, make intelligent choices that increase the flexibility of our growth options and give us the ability to scale resources independently. Enter the single processor Dell VxRail P670F.
The availability of the P670F with only a single processor provides more growth flexibility for our customers who have smaller clusters. By choosing a less compute dense single processor node, the same compute workload will require more nodes. There are two benefits to this:
- More efficient storage: More nodes in the cluster opens the door to using the more capacity efficient erasure coding vSAN storage option. Erasure coding, also known as parity RAID, (such as RAID 5 and RAID 6) has a capacity overhead of 33% compared to the 100% overhead that mirroring requires. Erasure coding can deliver 50% more usable storage capacity while using the same amount of raw capacity. While this increase in storage does come with a write performance penalty, VxRail with vSAN has shown that the gap between erasure coding and mirroring has narrowed significantly, and provides significant storage performance capabilities.
- Reduced cluster overhead: Clusters are designed around N+1, where ‘N’ represents sufficient resources to run the preferred workload, and ‘+1’ are spare and unused resources held in reserve should a failure occur in the nodes that make up the N. As the number of nodes in N increases, the percentage of overall resources that are kept in reserve to provide the +1 for planned and unplanned downtime drops.
Figure 1: Single processor P670F disk group options
You may be wondering, “How does all of this deliver flexibility in the options for scaling?”
You can scale out the cluster by adding a node. Adding a node is the standard option and can be the right choice if you want to increase both compute and storage resources. However, if you want to grow storage, adding capacity drives will deliver that additional storage capacity. The single processor P670F has disk slots for up to 21 capacity drives with three cache drives, which can be populated one at a time, providing over 160TB of raw storage. (This is also a good time to review virtual machine storage policies: does that application really need mirrored storage?) The single processor P670F does not have a single socket motherboard. Instead, it has the same dual socket motherboard as the existing P670F—very much a platform designed for expanding CPU and memory in the future.
If you are starting small, even really small, as in a 2-node cluster (don’t worry, you can still scale out to 64 nodes), the single processor P670F has even more additional features that may be of interest to you. Our customers frequently deploy 2-node clusters outside of their core data center at the edge or at remote locations that can be difficult to access. In these situations, the additional data resiliency that provided by Nested Fault Domains in vSAN is attractive. To provide this additional resiliency on 2-node clusters requires at least three disk groups in each node, for which the single processor P670F is perfectly suited. For more information, see VMware’s Teodora Hristov blog post about Nested fault domain for 2 Node cluster deployments. She also posts related information and blog posts on Twitter.
It is impressive how a single change in configuration options can add so much more configuration flexibility, enabling you to optimize your VxRail nodes specifically to your use cases and needs. These configuration options impact your systems today and as you scale into the future.
Author Information
Author: David Glynn, Sr. Principal Engineer, VxRail Technical Marketing
Twitter: @d_glynn