System information

A Principled Technologies test report 36
Comparing performance and cost: Dell PowerEdge VRTX vs.
legacy hardware solution
 Cycling – normal
Running the test
Test start and run times
We ran all workloads concurrently in order to start and record all performance counters for this report. The
specific testing parameters we used for each benchmark are included in the setup sections, and specifics for launching
these tests are described below.
About running the LoadGen test
To run the test, we installed the LoadGen client and server components and simulated 500 Exchange users
targeting the Exchange VM using LoadGen’s Exchange_200 Workload profile. We ran the LoadGen benchmark for 45
minutes, and beginning at the 15-minute mark, we used a 30-minute measurement window for performance
monitoring.
For more details about LoadGen, see
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=14060.
About running the DVD Store tests
We created a series of batch files, SQL scripts, and shell scripts to automate the complete test cycle. DVD Store
outputs an orders-per-minute metric, which is a running average calculated through the test. In this report, we report
the last OPM reported by each client/target pair.
Each complete test cycle consisted of the general steps listed below.
1. Clean up prior outputs from the target system and the client driver system.
2. Drop the database from the target.
3. Restore the database on the target.
4. Shut down the target.
5. Reboot the host and client system.
6. Wait for a ping response from the server under test (the hypervisor system), the client system, and the
target.
7. Let the test server idle for 20 minutes.
8. Start the DVD Store driver on the client.
We used the following DVD Store parameters for testing:
ds2sqlserverdriver.exe --target=<target_IP> --ramp_rate=10 --run_time=30 --
n_threads=12 --db_size=10GB --think_time=0.3 --detailed_view=Y --
warmup_time=15
About running the Iometer tests
1. Log into the Iometer machine.
2. Open the Iometer specification for the machine.
3. Click the start button.
4. After all access specifications finish running, remove the result files from the machine.