VBLOCK SOLUTION FOR SAP: USE CASE AND PERFORMANCE RESULTS

Vblock Solution for SAP: Use Case and Performance Results Table of Contents www.vce.com VBLOCK SOLUTION FOR SAP: USE CASE AND PERFORMANCE RESULTS Version 2.0 February 2013 1

Copyright 2013 VCE Company, LLC. All Rights Reserved. VCE believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date. The information is subject to change without notice. THE INFORMATION IN THIS PUBLICATION IS PROVIDED "AS IS." VCE MAKES NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND WITH RESPECT TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PUBLICATION, AND SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIMS IMPLIED WARRANTIES OR MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. 2

Contents Introduction... 5 Business case... 5 About this document... 5 Scope... 6 Audience... 6 Key results... 6 Feedback... 6 Technology overview... 7 Vblock Systems... 7 Vblock System 720... 7 Vblock System 320... 7 Vblock Systems benefits... 8 Architecture overview... 9 Vblock System configuration... 9 SAP server configuration... 9 SAP production environment instance on Vblock Systems... 10 Summary comparison of environments... 12 Testing methodology and results... 13 HP LoadRunner performance testing landscape... 13 Testing overview... 14 Methodology... 14 SAP environment performance testing... 15 Data center operations testing... 15 Infrastructure metrics... 16 Server... 16 Storage I/O... 16 VMware vcenter... 16 SolarWinds... 16 Performance comparison and usage... 17 RTC run... 18 FICO run... 19 Application performance comparison... 19 OTC run... 20 Application performance comparison... 20 Performance comparison... 21 Resource usage... 21 3

Performance analysis and key contributors... 22 Processor architecture and configuration... 22 UCS integrated and converged fabric configuration... 23 Virtual application server dynamic performance tuning... 23 Optimization and balancing of compute, network, and storage throughout the Vblock System... 23 SAP on Vblock System use cases... 24 Deployment and scaling of servers (vcpu, vmemory)... 24 SAP recovery using EMC RecoverPoint CRR... 29 Performing recovery using RecoverPoint bookmarks... 30 Stateless computing... 32 Dynamic on-demand provisioning... 33 Conclusion... 34 Appendix A: Performance and comparison results... 35 RTC run... 35 Application performance... 35 RTC run 4x4... 35 Resource usage... 36 Network usage... 36 I/O usage... 37 FCoE usage... 38 CPU/vCPU... 40 Storage... 41 FICO run... 46 Application performance comparison... 46 Resource usage for I/O... 47 Resource usage for FCoE... 48 CPU... 50 Storage... 51 OTC run... 55 Application performance comparison... 55 I/O resource usage... 56 FCoE resource usage... 58 vsphere... 59 CPU usage... 59 Storage... 61 4

Introduction Large multifaceted data center organizations are under increasing pressure to reduce operating and capital costs through virtualization technologies while also being asked to improve application availability and performance. Vblock Systems provide administrators and architects the capability to not only virtualize business-critical and resource-intensive applications such as SAP, but also recognize return on investment through improved performance and efficiency. This document addresses how SAP can be virtualized on Vblock Systems to achieve significant improvements in application performance compared with a typical retail customer environment using Cisco network infrastructure, EMC storage and information infrastructure, and VMware virtualization technologies. This document also provides test data and results illustrating the differences between SAP performance in non-virtualized and virtualized environments. Within this document, test data and results demonstrate the significant performance improvements realized with Vblock Systems. Performance analysis of these results is also given, to provide context to what the results actually mean in production and test environments. Business case Enterprise organizations need to validate the feasibility of virtualizing mission-critical applications like SAP in their data center environments as part of an overall private cloud strategy. To address their concerns about virtualizing SAP and placing it into the private cloud, administrators must have assurances that application performance and operation will in fact provide significant improvements. By adopting a private cloud strategy and virtualizing SAP on Vblock Systems, customers can achieve key business objectives to reduce costs through virtualization while also significantly improving application performance through ease of use. About this document This document presents information on the performance of SAP on Vblock Systems in a virtualized environment, compared to a retail customer s production and test environment in a non-virtualized environment. The test configuration was designed to support SAP running six application servers with close to 20,000 SAPS on the Database Server and close to 9,000 SAPS on each application server in the non-virtualized environment. Then, we ran a performance comparison between this configuration and the Vblock System. This document describes how SAP is virtualized using Vblock Systems, and it includes several test scenarios with performance metrics and comparisons that demonstrate the benefits of SAP on Vblock Systems. In addition, this document describes a set of use cases that are available when SAP is deployed within a private cloud infrastructure. 5

The purpose of this document is to describe how the: SAP solution was migrated to an offsite Vblock System. New environment was configured, tested, and validated to exceed the performance of a legacy environment. Advanced functionality of the Vblock System was used in value-add use cases, and validated within a performance-testing environment. Scope This document provides a focused evaluation of the SAP landscape on Vblock Systems and is applicable to a wide variety of SAP landscapes that could be virtualized to take advantage of the enhanced functionality of the Vblock System. Audience This document was written for customers interested in learning about SAP on the Vblock Systems, which includes SAP and infrastructure administrators and architects, as well as other individuals tasked with evaluating, acquiring, managing, operating, or deploying SAP in a virtualized data center environment. Key results The following list details the key improvements observed during SAP on Vblock Systems testing: Performance improvement of 50% or more when running SAP on Vblock Systems compared with a retail customer s production and test environments. Reduced complexity when configuring and deploying SAP, unlike physical server and database environments, which can be hampered by capacity, storage, and compute resource limitations. Increased scalability to dynamically add resources to a running virtual SAP dialog instance. Ability to perform SAP recovery using RecoverPoint continuous remote replication. Support for Stateless Computing, allowing Vblock Systems service profiles to be migrated across the environment without negatively impacting running systems. Simplified provisioning of new SAP servers through orchestration and automation Feedback To suggest documentation changes and provide feedback on this paper, send email to docfeedback@vce.com. Include the title of this paper, the name of the topic to which your comment applies, and your feedback. 6

Technology overview This section summarizes the technologies used in the solution. Vblock Systems The Vblock System from VCE is the world's most advanced converged infrastructure one that optimizes infrastructure, lowers costs, secures the environment, simplifies management, speeds deployment, and promotes innovation. The Vblock System is designed as one architecture that spans the entire portfolio, includes best-in-class components, offers a single point of contact from initiation through support, and provides the industry's most robust range of configurations. Vblock System 720 The Vblock System 720 is an enterprise, service provider class mission-critical system in the Vblock System 700 family, for the most demanding IT environments supporting enterprise workloads and SLAs that run thousands of virtual machines and virtual desktops. It is architecturally designed to be modular, providing flexibility and choice of configurations based on demanding workloads. These workloads include business-critical enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and database, messaging, and collaboration services. The Vblock System 720 leverages the industry s best director-class fabric switch, the most advanced fabric based blade server, and the most trusted storage platform. The Vblock System 720 delivers greater configuration choices, 2X performance and scale from prior generations, flexible storage options, denser compute, five 9s of availability, and converged network and support for a new virtualization platform that accelerates time to service and reduces operations costs. Vblock System 320 The Vblock System 320 is an enterprise and service provider ready system in the Vblock System 300 family, designed to address a wide spectrum of virtual machines, users, and applications. It is ideally suited to achieve the scale required in both private and public cloud environments. The Vblock System 320 has been engineered for greater scalability and performance to support large enterprise deployments of mission-critical applications, cloud services, VDI, mixed workloads and application development and testing. The Vblock System 320 delivers greater configuration choices, 2X performance and scale from prior generations, flexible storage options, denser compute, five 9s of availability, and converged network and support for a new virtualization platform that accelerates time to service and reduces operations costs. Every Vblock System 320 is available with the marketleading EMC VNX storage arrays. For more information, go to www.vce.com. 7

Vblock Systems benefits Vblock Systems provide SAP customers with several benefits from its integrated hardware stack including: Fewer unplanned downtimes and reduced planned downtimes for maintenance activities Reduced complexity due to preconfigured and centralized IT resources leading to standardized IT services Predictable performance and operational characteristics Tested and validated solutions with unified support and end-to-end vendor accountability Graceful scaling of a Vblock Systems environment by adding: - capacity to an existing Vblock System - more Vblock Systems Virtualized efficiency with predictable scaling for a given footprint 8

Architecture overview Vblock System configuration The table below describes the Vblock System 700 configuration used for this testing. Component Cisco Unified Computing System Storage Storage area network Configuration 1 x Cisco B250 Blade Microsoft Windows Server 2003 x64 Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise Edition SP3 CU4 4 x Cisco B200 Blades VMware vsphere Servers SAP central instance and SAP dialog instances on virtual machines EMC Symmetrix VMAX Cisco MDS 9222i Switches SAP server configuration This section covers specific configuration information for the SAP server. The key point to note here is that only the database server was physical; the rest of the servers were configured as virtual servers within the Vblock System. The table below describes the SAP server configuration. 9

Component Database server (B250 Blade) running on physical hardware Storage Application servers running on VMware vsphere (B200 Blades) SAP application server VMware vsphere 4 Storage Configuration 12 CPU cores (2 x six-core Westmere X5670 2.93 GHz) 192 GB RAM 22 x 320 GB data volumes 8 x 30 GB temp DB volumes 1 x 200 GB logs volume 1 x 2 TB backup/restore volume 1 x 50 GB SAP executables volume 1 x 350 GB OS, SQL and pagefile volume 1 x 25 GB clustered SQL main mount point volume Quest LightSpeed used for backup/restore 8 CPU cores (2 x quad-core Nehalem X5570 2.93 GHz) per blade 96 GB RAM per blade 4x4 vserver 40 GB RAM 3x6 vserver 40 GB RAM 25 GB boot volume 100 GB host volume This section describes the high-level configuration of the SAP environment on the Vblock System. The Production/QA/Test/Dev SAP environments were virtualized and resided on the Cisco UCS. EMC Symmetrix VMAX provided tiered storage based on performance expectations through a SAN network to the SAP landscape. SAP production environment instance on Vblock Systems The configuration team was able to realize a key benefit of the Vblock System: the ability to support multitier architectures running either physical, virtual, or mixed modes. To demonstrate this capability, a Microsoft SQL Server was installed and configured for a retail customer s SAP production environment system on a physical host. Using four ESXi hosts, eight virtual machines were then created using five UCS servers to build the SAP landscape. The primary components of the SAP landscape were: 1 x SAP central instance 7 x SAP application servers 10

Figure 1 shows the SAP landscape running on a Vblock System 700 configuration at the virtual, physical, and storage layers. Figure 1. SAP landscape running on a Vblock System 700 configuration Note: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is installed on a physical host while SAP central instance and dialog instances are installed on virtualized hosts. The back-end storage used for this setup is EMC Symmetric VMAX. Layer Virtual Physical Storage Description 4 Cisco UCS B200 half-blade servers 8-core CPU and 96 GB RAM Microsoft SQL Server Database 1 Cisco UCS B250-M2 full-blade server equipped with a 12-core CPU and 192 GB RAM. Redundant pair of Cisco UCS 6120 Fabric Interconnects with 10 Gigabit Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) functionality. Cisco MDS 9222i Multiservice Modular Switch connects the UCS blades through a fibre channel storage area network. 11

Summary comparison of environments The following table shows physical configurations of the retail customer s production and test environments, compared with the Vblock System. Summary Customer production Customer test Vblock System Database server 22 cores x 1.6 GHz (IA64/Itanium), 176 GB 24 cores x 2.8 GHz (Opteron), 192 GB 12 cores x 2.93 GHz (Nehalem/Westmere) 192 GB Database Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Operating system Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Central instance On App Server Tier On App Server Tier On App Server Tier App Server environment 8 cores x 2.6 GHz (Opteron), 32 GB each 8 cores x 2.4 GHz(Xeon) 32 GB each 4x4 vserver 40 GB RAM 3x6 vserver 40 GB RAM App Server number 6 6 HP Proliant BL680c G5 8 Estimated SAPS on DB Server Estimated rating ~19,388 SAP 2-tier SD Benchmark: 25,550 Estimated rating: 22,675 SAP 2-tier SD Benchmark : 25,500 (approx.) Estimated SAPS on App Server (each) 9950 8775 6250 HP LoadRunner N/A V 9.5 V 9.5 Virtual users per generator N/A 250 (5 second frequency, 120 runs) 250 (5 sec frequency, 120 runs) Load Generators N/A 10 10 The following definitions apply to each environment in this table: Customer production the environment where the customer was actually running SAP. This can be referred to as the as-is environment. Customer Test the environment the customer was planning to implement after performance testing was completed based on a new vendor platform. A copy of the existing production environment was used. This can be referred to as the to be environment. Vblock System the Vblock System used to measure performance against the Test environment at the customer site. 12

Testing methodology and results HP LoadRunner performance testing landscape The LoadRunner environment was set up on the Vblock System providing direct access to the SAP application. Figure 2 shows the SAP PE2 landscape on the Vblock System. According to the virtualized application servers (also known as dialog instances), the number of servers, amount of memory, and number of processor cores assigned could vary from test run to test run. HP Performance Center and HP LoadRunner 9.5 tools were used to generate a load on the PE2 Vblock System. LoadRunner was used to stress the PE2 Vblock System by executing OTC, RTC, and FICO business processes. This tool was also used to perform data analysis. Business processes (implemented as scripts) were created with the Virtual User Generator (LoadRunner scripting tool), which was later imported into the controller (Performance Center) to execute the test scenario outlined during the planning phase of the project. Figure 2. LoadRunner landscape for SAP on Vblock System Note: The above diagram shows the LoadRunner landscape using two virtualized blade servers running 11 virtual machines. Of these virtual machines, one was configured as Load Controller and 10 were used as Load Generators. 13

Testing overview The Vblock Solution for SAP described in this document consisted of a virtualized SAP instance on a Vblock System. A number of tests were performed on the SAP database (SAP DB), central instance, and an application server configuration comparable to what would be seen in typical production and test environments to demonstrate the significant performance improvements that can be expected when running SAP on Vblock Systems. Performance results between a virtualized SAP on Vblock Systems and a non-virtualized SAP landscape are detailed in this document. Performance testing was compared with performance test results from a typical test environment. The following tests were performed: SAP application server layer SAP application server sizing Online response times tests and batch throughput Stress tests using HP LoadRunner SAP batch and dialog load tests to test Vblock System capacity limits Server, storage, and network components Deployment and scaling of servers Dynamic resource allocation Migration of various components The purpose of this testing was to demonstrate the following characteristics of SAP on Vblock Systems: Meets or exceeds existing physical environment performance using Vblock Systems Analysis of the key attributes of the performance pertaining to the Vblock System design Demonstrate the efficiency of resource provisioning on Vblock Systems Methodology Only Vblock System and SAP standard procedures and methods were used to attain the benchmark results. The test results provided in this document were gathered using various systems and application administration tools. Testing experts compared the performance of the Vblock System with what would be seen in a traditional customer environment and divided the testing into two major areas: Application (SAP environment) Data center operations (Vblock System) environments, listed below 14

SAP environment performance testing The SAP environment performance testing included two test cases: HP LoadRunner for interactive performance testing HP LoadRunner was used to simulate Online Dialog user load on the SAP environment and Average Transaction Response. Both were then measured for the duration of test Batch processing The batch workload was reproduced, where possible. Additional batch and dialog instance load testing was conducted to significantly increase the workload on the system to identify capacity limits. In addition to the analysis of the LoadRunner results, usage statistics were gathered at the infrastructure levels during batch processing. Data center operations testing The data center operation testing was limited to three major categories: Addition of resources to a running virtual SAP dialog instance The testing team demonstrated the ability to add resources, such as vcpu and vmemory, to a running virtual SAP dialog instance. The team also successfully added vcpus (up to eight) and memory (up to 80 GB RAM) to a SAP dialog instance running on a virtual machine. The addition of vcpus and memory required a restart of the virtual machine. When the SAP dialog instance was restarted, the additional vcpu and memory were immediately apparent (in SAP transaction OS06). Migration of service profiles The testing team demonstrated and validated the nature of stateless computing on a Vblock System by migrating the Vblock System service profiles from one physical blade server to another. The relevant use cases were: - Hardware migration - Hardware maintenance - Hardware upgrade - Recovery in the event of hardware failure Operational testing The operation-level testing was completed to demonstrate the versatility of the Vblock System and summarize the flexibility and agility of Vblock Systems. These use cases included the following operational tests: - Deployment and scaling of the SAP application - On-demand provisioning of resources - Systems monitoring and management including patches and routine maintenance 15

Infrastructure metrics Performance monitoring tools were an important part of the testing process; in both physical and virtualized environments these tools played a critical role. Resources such as database, CPU, memory, storage, I/O, and other components needed to be measured to ensure performance requirements were met. For testing, the following performance monitoring tools were used to measure performance: Server The following performance monitoring tools were used during the RTC, OTC and FICO runs to measure database performance and CPU usage: Physical server PerfMon: PerfMon is an SNMP-based performance tool that was used to measure database and CPU performance and usage while a series of SAP RTC, OTC, and FICO tests were executed on the Vblock System. Virtual server VMware vcenter Performance Charts and ESXTOP The performance counters maintained by vcenter and accessed via the vcenter client were used to monitor the performance of the virtualized customer environment. Alternatively, VMware s ESXTOP was executed on the ESXi server to provide realtime views of ESXi server and virtual machine performance. Storage I/O Storage and I/O performance were measured using the EMC Symmetrix VMAX STP tool. STP can be used as a workload analyzer to collect performance statistics on a Symmetrix VMAX storage array. In the case of this testing, STP was used to measure storage performance while RTC, OTC and FICO runs were executed on the Vblock System. VMware vcenter VMware vcenter was used to take advantage of the capability to view CPU, memory, disk, and network resources in a single performance chart, rather than having to navigate multiple charts. Specifically, these charts provided: Aggregated views and high-level summaries of resource distribution across the entire environment Thumbnail views of virtual machines, hosts, resource pools, clusters, and data stores Drill-down capability to perform root cause analysis of problems Detailed storage views showing usage by file type SolarWinds SolarWinds was used to measure network and fabric-level performance of the Vblock System. 16

Performance comparison and usage This section of the report contains a comparison of the performance and usage of infrastructure resources while the environment was subjected to three critical business processes: RTC OTC FICO Note: The RTC, OTC, and FICO performance results were based on workload-generating scripts provided by the customer to measure the business process performance of the Vblock System compared with the customer test environment. This section covers two major areas: A summary of the business process performance Details of the underlying resource usage from an infrastructure perspective The following three tests were run on the Vblock System: RTC run OTC run with a 3x6 virtual machine configuration FICO run with a 3x6 virtual machine configuration For each of the above runs, application, vsphere servers and storage-level performance comparisons were performed, along with resource usage. 17

RTC run The table below shows performance statistics. SAP RTC transactions Customer system Vblock System Difference SAPGUI_IDOC_17_VAR1_RTC_EXECUTE 148.557 77.047 48% SAPGUI_IDOC_17_VAR2_RTC_EXECUTE 139.516 66.139 53% SAPGUI_IDOC_338_VAR1_RTC_EXECUTE 762.415 284.458 63% SAPGUI_IDOC_338_VAR2_EXECUTE 697.899 266.804 62% SAPGUI_MB51_RTC_EXECUTE 2.463 1.491 39% SAPGUI_ZPTR_MAIN_RTC_EXECUTE 0.534 0.297 44% SAPGUI_ZPTR_VAR1_RTC_EXECUTE 103.19 71.192 31% 1854.574 767.428 59% Figure 3. Performance statistics Note: The figure above shows the comparison of performance response time between the Vblock System and the customer s test platform. Results show that the Vblock System was able to process seven businesscritical RTC transactions with an improved average response time of 59%. 18

FICO run Application performance comparison The table and Figure 4 illustrate the performance improvements seen when running SAP FICO transactions in the Vblock System environment, as compared with the customer environment. SAP FICO transactions Customer system Vblock System Difference SAPGUI_FAGLB03_FICO_EXECUTE 23.348 0.178 99% SAPGUI_FAGLL03_FICO_EXECUTE 292.46 172.764 41% SAPGUI_FBL1N_FICO_EXECUTE 14.132 7.694 46% SAPGUI_FBL5N_FICO_EXECUTE 103.185 45.744 56% SAPGUI_KE24_FICO_EXECUTE 20.555 9.611 53% SAPGUI_KE30_VAR1_FICO_EXECUTE 34.28 15.703 54% SAPGUI_KE30_VAR2_FICO_EXECUTE 423.162 133.011 69% SAPGUI_ZGRIRAGING_FICO_EXECUTE 1058.521 189.728 82% SAPGUI_ZPOACCRUAL_FICO_EXECUTE 1163.213 307.942 74% 3132.856 882.375 72% Figure 4. SAP FICO transactions running on three virtual application servers 19

Note: The figure above shows the comparison of performance response time between the Vblock System and the customer s test platform. Results show that the Vblock System was able to process nine businesscritical FICO transactions with an improved average response time of 72%. OTC run Application performance comparison The table below and Figure 5 illustrate the performance improvements seen when running SAP OTC transactions in the Vblock System, as compared with the customer environment. SAP OTC transactions Customer system Vblock System Difference SAPGUI_VA41_OTC_DATA_EXECUTE 0.1 0.139-39% SAPGUI_VKM1_VAR2_OTC_EXECUTE 59.298 21.447 64% SAPGUI_VKM1_VAR3_OTC_EXECUTE 51.823 19.315 63% SAPGUI_ZBACKORDER_VAR1_OTC_EXECUTE 0.288 0.1 65% SAPGUI_ZBACKORDER_VAR2_OTC_EXECUTE 0.414 0.1 76% SAPGUI_ZDLVSTATUS_OTC_EXECUTE 16.412 18.083-10% SAPGUI_ZNOBACKORDER_OTC_EXECUTE 147.907 111.665 25% SAPGUI_ZVA14L_OTC_EXECUTE 8.472 1.083 87% SAPGUI_ZVASSUMM_VAR1_OTC_EXECUTE 26.027 11.733 55% SAPGUI_ZVASSUMM_VAR2_OTC_EXECUTE 1.538 0.497 68% SAPGUI_ZVENDORMARK_OTC_EXECUTE 2.68 0.906 66% SAPGUI_ZWORKLOAD_MAIN_EXECUTE 30.984 16.493 47% SAPGUI_ZWORKLOAD_VAR1_OTC_EXECUTE 34.455 15.443 55% SAPGUI_ZWORKLOAD_VAR2_OTC_EXECUTE 44.526 14.168 68% 424.924 231.172 46% 20

Figure 5. SAP OTC transactions running on three virtual appliccation servers Note: The figure above shows the comparison of performance response time between the Vblock System and the customer s test platform. Results show that the Vblock System was able to process 14 businesscritical OTC transactions with an improved average response time of 46%. Performance comparison The performance comparison was completed for application, vsphere server, and storage components from the application performance availability and usage perspectives: Resource usage Resource usage focus was on the Vblock System at the component level. The resource usage was captured to understand the overall performance of the Vblock System from an infrastructure perspective, while running SAP as one of the solutions. The test team was interested in the use of the following key components of the Vblock System while running SAP: Network Storage Servers CPU 21

From the virtual machines perspective, the four application servers (4 x vcpu virtual machines) used were: SAPCL55 SAPCL53 SAPCL54 SAPCL59 Performance analysis and key contributors The significant performance metrics and measurements described in the previous section can be realized due to a number of improvements in storage and application layout, network optimization, and inherent advantages of the Vblock System, with its optimized multi-application compute system. The following key factors contributed to the superior performance improvements observed in the test results provided in this configuration report. Processor architecture and configuration The Xeon 5570 processor was shown in testing to exceed the performance of the Opteron processor in server benchmark testing (1.6 times faster); while the Xeon 5680 (used in these tests) was observed to far exceed the 5570 s performance by an additional 43%, leading the combination of the Xeon 5680 and UCS B250 server to vastly outperform Opteron-based HP servers. Figure 6. Cisco UCS B250 M2 performance 22

UCS integrated and converged fabric configuration One of the key factors in understanding how these performance results exceeded expected results is in the UCS blade configuration. Because the SAP layout enables the database server (physical), all application servers (virtual), and LoadRunner clients (virtual) to reside on a single chassis connected to a set of 6120 Fabric Interconnects, the majority of SAP traffic remains internal, thus taking advantage of the large amount of bandwidth available. Virtual application server dynamic performance tuning Application server virtual machines in the Vblock System were sized and numbered to approximately match the SAPS capacity of the TE2 application tier, which was 3 x 8,775 (approximately 26,325) SAPS. In vsphere, four- way application servers are a sweet spot and the SAPS rating of a four-way virtual machine is estimated to be 6,250. Based on 6,250 SAPS per four-way virtual machine, four application servers were required to approximately match the TE2 application tier rating. After initial testing with a 4 x 4 application server virtual machines configuration, an uneven distribution in the CPU usage was observed, whereby 1-2 of the virtual machines were at 100% CPU usage, while the remaining virtual machines were relatively underused. This was attributed to imperfect load balancing of the virtual users as they were ramped up by LoadRunner. To more evenly distribute CPU usage across the application tier and prevent a virtual machine from spiking to 100%, the number of virtual machines was reduced and then made larger in size. The next sizing configuration to reflect this and also roughly match the TE2 application tier SAPS rating was 3 x 6-way virtual machines. The SAPS rating of a 6-way virtual machines configuration is approximately between 8,000 and 9,000 SAPS (estimated from 4- and 8-way benchmark certifications 2009028 and 2009029, which shows approximately linear scalability). Optimization and balancing of compute, network, and storage throughout the Vblock System Performance testing showed that less than 25% of cache, disk, and front-end and back-end ports were used. The Symmetrix VMAX storage array can handle much larger workloads, thus validating a key design point of optimization and balancing of compute, network and storage throughout the Vblock System. In this example, a Vblock System 700 minimum configuration was designed with four UCS chassis with corresponding network and storage capacity. The customer test bed consumes one UCS chassis, and thus less than 25% of storage resources. 23