How many tiles to run?

[tyson_anz]

My Customer has a cluster with :

384 Physical Cores they want to use 4:1 vcpu:pcpu overprovisioning:

12TB Physical RAM

511TB vSAN Storage.

I think CPU is the resource that runs out the quickest with the Tile Requirements.

So I am thinking 32 tiles.  Is this correct?

[RebeccaG]

Hi Tyson, it's great that you're taking the time to plan out your number of tiles before starting to test. This allows you to ensure your other hardware resources such as memory and storage capacity are sufficient for the expected number of tiles.

Yes, 32 tiles stacks up in two different ways.

1. Overprovisioning your 384 physical cores by 4 x = 1536. Each VMmark tile consumes 47 vCPUs, which comes out to 32 tiles.

2. Secondly, there's a result on vmmark.com which ran 26 tiles on 320 total cores. According to that consolidation ratio, your 384 total cores could run 31.2 tiles.

This is just an estimate and not a guarantee that you'll get a compliant result at 32 tiles. You probably want to find the max number of passing tiles. After you have a successful 1 tile run (to test configuration), you could run at 24 tiles and then increase tiles slowly from there until you get a failing run. 

[tyson_anz]

Thanks Rebecca for your answer.

I ran the benchmark using 32 tiles.  The test was able to stress CPU Consumption on average to 95% across all hosts.

So I could probably squeeze out 1 more tile.  But for my purposes I believe I have a baseline to compare.

For others who read this post.  You can compare other hardware here : https://www.vmware.com/au/products/vmmark/results3x.html

Basically looking for similar hardware will give you somewhat of an idea of how many tiles to run.