Infrastructure as a Service: Benchmarking Cloud Computing
by Johan De Gelas on June 2, 2011 8:50 PM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing
- IT Computing general
- Cloud Computing
Terremark’s Enterprise Cloud
Terremark’s Enterprise Cloud is based on the “Infinistructure” platform, a mix of servers, storage, and networking with a self-service portal digitalOps. The software part of the Infinistructure Utility Computing platform is based upon VMware’s vSphere virtualization platform and makes use of vMotion, load balancing and Dynamic Resource Scheduling (DRS).
You can create a server in a few minutes by using the templates that Terremark provides (“Create Server”). This instructional movie gives a quick overview how this is done. It is a simple and straightforward process that takes 10-15 minutes at most.
The digitalOps environment interface has three tabs: Resources, Devices, and Network. The Devices tab lists all the virtual machines you have created so far. The virtual machines can be sorted/grouped as you can see below.
Creating servers (using the “Create Server” option) from the Terremark templates was very easy, but the "Create Blank Servers" option was a different story. It was not possible to mount our own ISOs. According to Terremark, this will be fixed in the next release, as you will be able to import your own Open Virtualization Format (OVF) virtual machine. Installing ISOs will not be possible yet.
The Resources tab gives you the real “cloud computing” or “IaaS” feel. Your “cloud data center” is a collection of a specified amount of processor GHz, several gigabytes of memory space, and storage usage. You also get a summary of how much of those resources you have used the past 24 hours.
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TRodgers - Thursday, June 2, 2011 - link
I like the way you have broken this subject it to small succinct snipets of value information. I work in a place where many of our physical resources are being converted into virtual ones, and it is so often difficult to break down the process, the reasoning, and benefit trees etc to the many different audiences we have.johnsom - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
You said:Renting 5GB of RAM is pretty straightforward: it means that our applications should be able to use up to 5GB of RAM space.
However this is not always the case with IaaS. vSphere allows memory over committing which allows you to allocate more memory across the virtual machines than the physical hardware makes available. If physical RAM is exhausted your VM gets swap file space tanking your VM memory performance. Likely killing performance when you need it most, peak memory usage.
GullLars - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
If the pools are well dimentioned, this should almost never happen.If the pagefile is on something like an ioDrive, performance wouldn't tank but be a noticable bit slower. If the pagefile is on spinning disks, the performance would be horrible if your task is memory intensive.
duploxxx - Sunday, June 5, 2011 - link
THat is designing resource pools, if a service company is that idiot they will run out of business.Although swapping on SSD (certainly on next gen vsphere) is another way to avoid the slow performance as much as possible it is still slower and provides Hypervisor overhead.
Ram is cheap, well chosen servers have enough memory allocation.
ckryan - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
I'm quite pleased with the easy, informative way the article has been presented; I for one would like to see more, and I'm sure future articles on the way. Keep it up, I think it's facinating.JohanAnandtech - Sunday, June 5, 2011 - link
Thank you for taking the time to let us know that you liked the article. Such readers have kept me going for the past 13 years (started in 1998 at Ace's ) :-).HMTK - Monday, June 6, 2011 - link
Yes, you're old :p The main reason I read Anand's these days is exactly for your articles. I liked them at Ace's, like them even more now. Nevertheless, nostalgia sometimes strikes when I think of Aces's and the hight quality of the articles and forums there.bobbozzo - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
Hi, please include costs of the systems benchmarked... in the case of the Cloud, in $/hour or $/month, and in the case of the server, a purchase price and a lease price would be ideal.Thanks for all the articles!
bobbozzo - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
Oh, and include electric consumption for the server.krazyderek - Friday, June 3, 2011 - link
i agree, showing a simple cost comparison would have really rounded out this article, it was mentioned several time "you pay for bursting" but how much? put it in perspective for us, relate it to over purchasing hardware for your own data center.