Guidelines for Configuring Virtual Partitions on Cellular Platforms

To address the (a), tools like HP Integrity Essentials Capacity Advisor can be used to gather

resource usage profile data for the individual workloads in a non-consolidated environment

and to analyze them to help predict the amount of resources needed for each workload on a

target consolidated environment.

To address (b), the user should consider the impact of memory access latencies in a NUMA

based cellular platform which vary [9] depending on whether the accesses are:

• local to a cell (CLM: cell local memory)

• remote between cells connected to the same crossbar (1 hop)

• remote between cells connected to different crossbars (2 hops)

• to interleaved memory (ILM)

In large cellular platforms (that is, with more than four cells), as the size of the nPartition

increases there is a higher chance that the cells assigned to the nPartition are connected to

different crossbars. These variations in memory access latencies do impact the workload

performance.

Virtual partition configurations that have resource localities may have lower workload

performance. The extent of performance impact depends on the size of the nPartition and

also the configuration of the virtual partition and the nature of the workload.

Workload Performance Study

In order to help illustrate the influence of resource localities on workload performance the

following study was done. The scope of this study is focused to provide basic insights.

Hence, customers (or users) should not treat results as comprehensive or applicable to all

workloads and configurations. Two sample workloads that are considered representative of

typical enterprise customer applications—namely: SAP-SD 2-tier and SPEC-jbb—were chosen

to be run in a vPars environment hosted on a small hardware configuration.

Overview of Workloads

SAP SD 2-tier

SAP SD (Sales and Distribution) is a standard application benchmark developed by SAP and

is one of the most published and visible SAP benchmarks [6]. It measures the system

performance for processing sales and distribution transactions. A transaction consists of a

full business process that captures activities from the full order processing cycle -- from order

creation to delivery to invoicing.

There are two configurations for the SAP SD benchmark: 2-tier and 3-tier. In a SAP SD 2-tier

environment, both the database software and the SAP application run on the same system.

Thus, it provides a way to demonstrate the ability to handle both the application and the

database software with a single system. In a 3-tier environment, the database and SAP

application run on separate systems.