Evaluating Futuremark's Servermark VDI on the Supermicro SYS-5028D-TN4T
by Ganesh T S on September 1, 2016 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Benchmarks
- Futuremark
- Supermicro
- Servers
- Xeon-D
Concluding Remarks
Coming to the business end of the article, there are two separate aspects to discuss - the hardware that we used in this evaluation, and the Servermark VDI benchmark itself.
Supermicro's SYS-5028D-TN4T is the perfect machine for IT enthusiasts and tinkerers to experiment with various virtualization tools. In addition to being compact and relatively silent, it is also frugal in terms of power consumption. Our review configuration idled around 35W, and even subjecting the unit to AIDA64's system stability test with all aspects loaded pushed the unit up to 105W only. The availability of dual native 10GBASE-T ports more than justify its current street price. It does have some drawbacks in terms of chassis design (placement of USB ports and the design of the hot-swap bays) and the access to internal components is not hassle-free. However, these are minor aspects in the grand scheme of things. Readers looking to invest in a virtualization lab machine would do little wrong in opting for the Supermicro SYS-5028D-TN4T.
Futuremark's Servermark has been in development for quite some time. Their PCMark offering is undoubtedly very well respected in the desktop benchmarking circles. It is therefore logical that they are trying to use that to move into the server benchmarking space. There are plenty of configurable options to make the usage of multiple PCMark instances a valid virtualization benchmark. In particular, the duty cycle parameter enables IT administrators / benchmark users to have a better fit between the evaluation and the expected workloads on the server.
Futuremark's aim with Servermark VDI appears to be two-fold. On one hand, they want to provide IT administrators with a tool to evaluate how many virtual desktops they can allocate on a particular server. On the other hand, they also want to supply server vendors with a marketing tool. Armed with a Servermark VDI certificate, the vendors can make a better pitch to business users. The certificate can also help the latter to consider the right server offering for their needs.
Futuremark's Servermark VDI faces stiff competition from existing well-established benchmarks such as SPEC's SPECvirt_sc2013, LoginVSI's offerings and even VMWare's own VMMark. Perfecting a server / VDI benchmark is a tough task, and this field is obviously not as crowded as the desktop benchmarking arena. Therefore, Servermark VDI is definitely a welcome addition. In our opinion, the results delivered by it are based on solid benchmarking and can help users arrived at independent and reliable conclusions.
Futuremark indicated that the future plans for Servermark VDI include expanded support for more virtualization environments beyond VMWare, including Hyper-V. In addition, once PCMark 10 gets released, Servermark will support it as well.
VDI is only one server application. We believe Futuremark is evaluating other server application scenarios also. Specific server benchmarks focusing on particular server aspects like, say, the data store / disk subsystem would also be welcome. In its current beta state, Servermark VDI seems to have had a promising start in the evaluation of server systems. We expect / hope that more stakeholders are providing feedback to Futuremark in order to add more features to Servermark and fine-tune its current features.
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Ryan Smith - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link
Ultimately this is an article we worked on because Futuremark's software looked neat, and we wanted to see if it could tell us anything useful.We're nerds at heart. We like looking at new things.=)
aaronb1138 - Friday, September 2, 2016 - link
Although FM puts "2000" as their recommended benchmark level, I think you will find for VDI that the bar is much, much lower. The main gist of VDI is the fact that most users need very little computational power continuously. They need the boot and load software bumps and then most productivity software sips at a few percent of CPU. I've noticed web browsers, especially Chrome, have become the biggest consumers of CPU on workstations, and it seems almost vindictive the way certain browsers will hose a system when resource starved. Mozilla/Firefox is especially designed to make virtualization and RDC scenarios bad (the thousands of cache folders is intentionally shit design for roaming profiles and causes huge login hangs).I noticed a NUC gets around 5000 in the benchmark. From my experience in VDI as well as XenApp and RDS architectures, a NUC could support around 10 users with sufficient RAM (16GB would do it - 32GB and we're talking 20+ users, maybe 40 in XenApp/RDS instead of VDI).
Also, for the love of all that is holy, do not benchmark against RAID 0, it invalidates much of the testing. Test against both RAID 10 and 5 as those are industry standards for such infrastructures.
If you really want to deep dive, check out differences in memory consumption in HyperV vs VMware with VDI. While both support memory deduplication, experience shows that HyperV is much faster and more effective at VDI memory dedupe, while VMware seems to rely a tad heavy on memory ballooning. In server farm / VDI situations, RAM and storage I/O are ALWAYS more limiting than CPU throughput. You're not putting Pro-E and Solidworks into a VDI farm most of the time, just MS Office, a line of business application, and a browser.
madisson - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link
maybe i am approaching this too focused on a consumer's mind, but all of that hardware needs to be shipped, unpacked, installed, and plugged in. For me, I prefer to log-in to a cloud PC for gaming and virtual PC. There are several services similar to what I'm talking about, www.paperspace.com being the one I happened to pick.I'm sure FM goes for more enterprise-level agreements, but what about the small teams and individuals?
name99 - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link
It seems to me this is completely a WINTEL benchmark.That's fine for a certain class of users, I guess, but is, I think, a lot less interesting for many readers. It does nothing to clarify whether either
- a Linux PC would be a better server solution OR
- whether an ARM server could handle a particular load.
Obviously AnandTech can do what they want in their reviews, but I, for one, am a lot less interested in comparisons that are focussed on the few percent differences between Wintel box A and Wintel box B than in comparisons between very different systems.
powerarmour - Thursday, September 1, 2016 - link
Exactly.aaronb1138 - Friday, September 2, 2016 - link
Well, they were looking at VDI. I don't know what kind of monster would try VDI+Linux+end user workloads in the workplace. But yeah, keep saying dumbass shit about Linux and ARM.gabemcg - Tuesday, September 6, 2016 - link
Lots of hostility unfairly being directed at the authors/editors here. I thought using the benchmark preview as a way to couch a hardware review was genuinely interesting both as a nerd with a home lab, and a professional wanting to keep abreast of how the enterprise class gear is being evaluated. Keep up the good work, haters gonna hate!simran sidhki - Thursday, October 18, 2018 - link
hello