Running VMmark 2 on a single host?

[aminf13]

Hi everyone,

I have a question regarding VMmark 2. I have successfully ran VMmark 1 on a single host system to collect some information regarding activity of different VMs. With the release of VMmark 2, I wanted to take advantage of the new OS/Application stack provided, but I still want to use it on a single host. I don't want to measure or report scores, just want to collect some data regarding the activity of different VMs while they are running. So I'm not interested in the measuring the performance of the data-center management part (like vMotion and Storage vMotion, load balancing, etc) and preferably I don't want them to be running. The question therefore is whether it's possible to set up and run a VMmark 2 Tile on a single physical host (similar to VMmark 1) by changing/disabling some of the configurations in the harness config files on the client?

Thanks,

Amin

[jpschnee]

Hi,

Yes, although your runs won't be compliant, you can certainly disable all of the operations that are dependant on multiple hosts.  Take a look at the VMMARK2.config file and benchmarking guide for additional details.

For example, to disable all of the infrastruture operations, in your VMMARK2.config file you would set

INFRASTRUCTURELIST=""

[aminf13]

  Thank you so much for the quick response. I will check the guide for further details, but wouldn't the harness complain that there's no dynamic load balancing or a server that is running vCenter?

  Amin

[jpschnee]

You're welcome.  It will complain and mark the run non-compliant, but continue.

[RebeccaG]

In the VMMARK2.CONFIG file, you'll also want to make sure that

DoClusterMapping=0

If it's set to 1, it will stop the run on one host.

Rebecca

[jumperel]

When your are running the benchmark on a physical server eg windows 2008 R2 you must install all the mail sever and Olio etc. or just Exchange 2007?

[RebeccaG]

Hi Jumperel, if I understand your question, you are asking if it is possible to run VMmark on a physical server installed with Windows 2008 R2, for example.

VMmark can run with reduced functionality on, at minimum, one physical server installed with ESX and one other physical machine installed with Windows Server 2003 or 2008 to serve as the benchmark's client.

It's not possible to run VMmark on a physical server installed with Windows 2008 R2 as the benchmark is made up of many virtual machines running workloads.

Take a look at this post which describes running VMmark on one host with reduced functionality.

Rebecca

[jumperel]

Thank you Rebecca for your answer.

I just wanted to make a comparison between physical and virtual servers for my final paper, wich I already did (i'm engineer already :D), but I used a software from passmark. I also saw that this software was used in a similar test between ESXi, physical and Xen.

Anyway, have a nice day

[aminf13]

  I finally got to the point to start the VMmark2 run on a single host. All VMs are up and running, the client harness pings them using STAF, but then it tries to access vCServer and fails. I have not setup a vCServer. I only have a single host that is running ESX and contains all VMs. I'm wondering if/how I can skip accessing the vCServer part in the harness.

  Thanks,

  Amin

[BecharaAbouRaha]

U can try to comment or remove the entries related to the VCenter Server in the beginning of the file VMmark2.cfg.....

[jpschnee]

Commenting out the entries won't help here. The harness doesn't support running VMmark2 without vCServer. 

[BecharaAbouRaha]

I thought this even i tried to comment only the variable of the cluster....It desnt work so i had to create a cluster and move my host under test into it....

[aminf13]

So, to confirm this, I need to create a vCServer machine, connect my SINGLE host to it, disable infrastructure workloads and turn off cluster mapping in the vmmark2.config. Is that enough to have a single host run?

  Thanks,

  Amin

[jpschnee]

In your new vCServer, you'll need to create a single host cluster and add your host to it.  This, in addition to the disabling cluster mapping and infrastructure operations, should be what you need.

[aminf13]

OK, thanks. Can the vCServer machine be a virtual machine?

[jpschnee]

Sure.  Normally I'd say that it shouldn't be run on any of the hosts under test but since your runs are already non-compliant I'll leave that up to you.

[aminf13]

  Thanks so much, I installed vCenter on a VM in a different machine (as the guide says) and I had a successful run of VMmark2 on one host. However, there are a copule of minor issues:

  1- At the end of the run, I get a warning that Standby server might have terminiated prematurely:

20120720-14:01:54 Info  Process: Tile 0: standbyclient failed to start/complete. Returned: RC = 1, STAFResult =                      
20120720-14:01:54 Info  Info : Warning : Checking Tile0 Standby for premature termination

  2- I don't see a Score_0_Tile_test.out file. Is there anyway that I can generate this file manually, out of the generated .wrf files?

  Amin

[jpschnee]

As far as the standby warning, you'll need to review the Standby*wrf files for errors. 

Yes you can generate a score.out manually.  Just open a cygwin prompt and then change directories to the results folder from your last run.  Then run perl ../../tilescore.pl -t <num tiles>, run -h for more assistance with tilescore.pl.

[aminf13]

  Thanks, I generated the scores using the scripts. However, when checking the Standby0.wrf I just see a serires of PONGs back from the server. No error is reported in that file. Any where else to check or any ideas about the reason for the warning?

  Amin

[aminf13]

  Another side question here (it probably does not belong to this thread). I see my olio ratios all being 0.75. Is this benchmark a disk intensive one? What might be the bottlenecks for this and how can I boost it to 1.0 or above?

  Thanks,

  Amin