Summary

The testing outlined in this paper was conducted in conjunction with Intel and Solidigm. Server hardware was provided by Dell, processors and network devices were provided by Intel, and storage technology was provided by Solidigm. All tests were conducted in Dell Labs with contributions from Intel Performance Engineers and Dell System Performance Analysis Engineers.

VMware ESXi is one of the most widely deployed hypervisor solutions in the world, and many customers using ESXi choose vSAN as the strategic storage solution for their virtualized environments. Because the combination of ESXi and vSAN forms a strategic pillar of their IT infrastructure, it is critical that customers keep them current by deploying upgrades and patches throughout their life cycle. ESXi 7 has been the standard upon which customer deployments of the last two generations of Dell PowerEdge servers have relied, but with the release of the new ESXi 8 and vSAN 8, customers must make a choice: Upgrade their old hardware with these new releases or transition to these new releases using the latest generation of servers from Dell Technologies.

Transitioning between major releases of software can be challenging. vSAN 8, for example, offers a completely new architecture called “Express Storage Architecture.” This technology is designed to increase performance, reliability, and manageability, but it requires a different, more current hardware architecture. Upgrading old hardware with this new environment can add risk and complexity, and can result in compatibility issues that could cause unwanted downtime. The solution for many customers is to deploy the new hypervisor and vSAN architecture on new hardware and then work to transition the virtual machines from their existing environment to their new environment. Making the deployment easier, the release of ESXi 8 and the corresponding vSAN 8 coincides with the announcement of Dell’s next generation of servers based on the new 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors. To facilitate the transition, Dell and Intel have worked together to profile the performance of PowerEdge R750 running ESXi 7.0U3 and vSAN 7.0U3 and then contrast the results with the performance of the new PowerEdge R760 running ESXi 8 with vSAN 8.0.

Note: While the Express Storage Architecture is expected to increase performance even further, we conducted our testing using the legacy vSAN disk configurations. This paper highlights the findings of that testing.

Configurations

Testing was conducted on the following systems:

Table 1. System configurations

¹ The Dell Ent NVMe P5600 MU U.2 3.2 TB drives are manufactured by Solidigm.

Workloads

Performance was measured with the following workloads:

• Storage performance using HiBench
• Database performance using SQL Server 2019 running on Windows Server 2022 with HammerDB
  
  

Measured performance

Table 2.  HiBench

Table 3.  SQL Server with HammerDB

Conclusion

The latest VMware hypervisor and storage software combined with the latest Dell PowerEdge server technology using 4th Gen Intel® Xeon® processors provides a compelling performance upgrade. Our testing showed a significant increase in storage performance, with a 32.34 percent increase in throughput (IOPS) and a corresponding 30 percent reduction in latency. This increase in storage performance also translates to greatly improved application performance, as demonstrated with SQL Server 2019 new orders per minute (NOPM) when measured generation over generation.

Summary

This joint paper outlines a brief discussion on the key hardware considerations when planning and configuring a VMware vSAN™server configuration. Including sample PowerEdge server configurations for a starting deployment and quoting process.

Today’s enterprises need to move fast to stay competitive. For example, high- speed transactional processing solutions accelerate insights for financial trading or wholesale supply. High-speed analytics solutions enable users to quickly identify patterns in customer behavior or resource usage to inform better predictions and forecasts.

IT professionals are on point to deliver this high-performance data while reducing infrastructure costs. That is why IT pros choose Microsoft SQL Server 2019 running on VMware vSAN™.

They also choose Dell EMC™ PowerEdge™ rack servers configured with the latest generation of Intel® technologies. What are the benefits?

1. Selecting SQL Server 2019 enables IT pros to deliver industry leading performancei.
2. Adopting hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) powered by vSAN, combined with VMware vSphere®, enables IT pros to manage compute and storage with a single platform that lowers infrastructure costs when compared to traditional three-tier architecturesii.
3. Dell EMC PowerEdge servers running vSphere boost the orders per minute (OPM) of transactional databases more than 1.9 timesiii, and they allow users to complete 8x the analytics in 39 percent less timeiv, when compared to previous-generation servers.

Key Considerations

To get started, available server configurations for SQL server 2019 are shown in the “Available Configurations” section below. Key considerations include the following:

• CPU: High-frequency 3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors with 2.8 GHz clock speeds help optimize performance by enabling SQL Server 2019 locks to be released more quickly so multiple processes can access data faster. Additionally, Dell Technologies recommends using multiples of 24 CPU cores to make it easier to segment vSAN clusters and match the licensing structure of SQL Server 2019 Standard edition.
• Memory and Storage: The Base configuration can be set up with two storage groups and up to eight capacity drives, while the Plus configuration can be equipped with up to four storage groups and up to 12 capacity drives. In general, using more storage groups provides better write performance.

Dell Technologies recommends 1 TB of Intel® Optane™ persistent memory (PMem) 200 series per node. Intel Optane PMem creates a larger memory pool that enables SQL Server 2019 to run faster because data can be read from logical, in-memory storage, as opposed to a physical disk. For storage, Dell recommends using Intel Optane Solid State Drives (SSDs) for caching frequently accessed data. The Intel Optane SSD P5800X is the world’s fastest data center SSDv. PCIe® Gen4 NAND SSDs are recommended for the capacity tier.

• Networking: The configuration specifies Intel® Ethernet 800 Series network interface controllers (NICs) with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), a hardware-acceleration feature that reduces the load on the CPU. Intel Ethernet 800 Series NICs start at 10 gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and scale up to 100 GbE. With Intel Ethernet 800 Series NICs, you will notice faster data speed between vSAN clusters, which becomes more important as node counts grow.

Available Configurations

The Plus configuration includes more cores, memory, and storage to support more or larger SQL Server 2019 instances and provide better performance.

Learn More

Contact your Dell or Intel account team for a customized quote 1-877-289+-3355

Visit the Dell vSAN Configuration Options Getting Started

Download “Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes.” to learn about hyperconverged building blocks for VMware vSAN™ environments.

Download “Microsoft SQL 2019 on Intel Optane Persistent Memory (PMem) Using Dell EMC PowerEdge Servers” to learn about advantages of using Intel Optane PMem with SQL Server 2019.

i TPC. TPC-E webpage. http://tpc.org/tpce/default5.asp.

ⁱⁱ Forrester Consulting. “The Total Economic Impact™ of VMware vSAN.” Commissioned by VMware. July 2019. www.vmware.com/learn/345149_REG.html.

ⁱⁱⁱ Principled Technologies. “Dell EMC PowerEdge R650 servers running VMware vSphere 7.0 Update 2 can boost transactional database performance to help you become future ready.” Commissioned by Dell Technologies. June 2021. http://facts.pt/MbQ1xCy.

^iv Principled Technologies. “Analyze more data, faster, by upgrading to latest-generation Dell EMC PowerEdge R750 servers.” Commissioned by Dell Technologies. June 2021. http://facts.pt/poJUNRK.

v Source: 14 at: Intel. “Intel® Optane™ SSD P5800X Series - Performance Index.” https://edc.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/performance/benchmarks/intel-optane-ssd-p5800x-series/.

^vi The “Plus” configuration supports more or larger Microsoft SQL Server 2019 instances with higher core count CPUs and additional disk

groups that deliver higher performance.

^vii Plus configuration: the Intel Xeon Platinum 8362 processor is recommended, but the Intel Xeon Platinum 8358 processor can be used instead if the Intel Xeon Platinum 8362 processor is not yet available.

^viii Base and Plus configurations: Intel Optane PMem in Memory Mode provides more memory at lower cost.

^ix Base and Plus configurations: The Intel Optane SSD P5800X is recommended, but the previous-generation Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X can be used instead if the Intel Optane SSD P5800X is not yet available.