VMware Publishes Deployment Guide For ArcGIS Server 9.3 With Performance Results

VMware has published a comprehensive deployment guide for ArcGIS Server 9.3. While this guide is focused on deployment it does contain a number of technical considerations to take into account during deployment.

This document describes the best practices for running a typical ESRI ArcGIS® Server deployment on VMware® Infrastructure. It provides basic guidance on the architectural design of an ArcGIS deployment and the value of utilizing the VMware platform to provide virtual infrastructure.  It then discusses results of recent testing conducted jointly by VMware and ESRI characterizing the performance and functionality of ArcGIS Server running on VMware infrastructure version 3.5i update 3.  Finally, it outlines some best practices for utilizing the two products together in your datacenter.

The guide contains some useful performance test results which is very handy for those looking at options. VMware and ESRI jointly conducted performance tests to characterize the performance of ArcGIS Server on VMware Infrastructure. The hardware configuration tested were as follows:

Hardware Configuration
Host Server:

• Dell 2950 Server running VMware ESXi 3.5u3
• 2 x Quad E5450 Core  CPUs and 16 GB RAM

Storage:

• Local attached SAS disks with 2 disk RAID 1; ESXi and VMware VMFS were installed on same disk. 
• NFS with 6 SAS disk RAID 5; ESXi was installed on local disk and NFS was used for virtual machine storage.

Physical Server Configuration

• Dell 2950 Server running Windows 2003 x64
• 2 x Quad E5450 Core CPUs and 16 GB of RAM

Virtual Machine  Configuration

The following ArcGIS Server configurations were used in testing:

• 4 virtual machines: 1 vCPU / 2GB RAM: Equivalent to native 4 cores with 8 GB RAM each.
• 4 virtual machines: 1 vCPU / 4GB RAM: Equivalent to native 4 cores with 16GB RAM each.
• 4 virtual machines: 2 vCPU / 2 GB RAM: Equivalent to native 8 cores with 8 GB RAM each.
• 4 virtual machines: 2 vCPU / 4 GB RAM: Equivalent to native 8 cores with 16 GB each.
• 8 virtual machines: 1 vCPU / 2GB RAM: Equivalent to native 8 cores with 16 GB each.

The workload used for the testing process were as follows:

ESRI used Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team edition to generate a simulated workload to the ArcGIS Server instances. The tests consisted of either 4 or 8 clients simultaneously submitting export map requests to ArcGIS Server 9.3 optimized REST MapServices. Each client continuously submits a request, waits for a response and submits another request with no think time for a period of 60 minutes. Throughput is calculated as the number of transactions per hour that are supported on the machine with a minimally acceptable transaction time of three seconds.

While the guide contains results for both methods of storage, looking at 2 x SAS RAID-1 direct attached disks we can see the comparisons between physical server and virtual machines.

From this table you can see that in some instances physical performance is almost double that of running virtual machines. The configuration that provided the best throughput:

The virtual configuration that provided the highest throughput of 52344 transactions per minute used eight separate Microsoft Windows 2003 x64 virtual machines, each with 1 x vCPUs and 2 GB of RAM.

The second best throughput of 50562 transactions per minute, and a transaction time of 0.58 seconds, was provided by the configuration with four virtual machines, each with 2 vCPUs and 4 GB of RAM.

With these tests and results we can start to get a good understanding of how ArcGIS Server 9.3 performs under load when using VMware as a platform. We get many users asking if VMware is supported. VMware is a fully supported environment for the ArcGIS platform and I have always recommended the use of VMware for development and testing. For production environments I still recommend the use of physical servers. This will ensure you get maximum throughput under load. We can see the performance difference from the results above. There were no tests run against a SAN based configuration but as the deployment best practices state:

Using a SAN device for storage is recommended to best meet I/O requirements for applications and to leverage all VMware Infrastructure features and capabilities. Using iSCSI or NFS, respectively, provide the next best storage performance. If ArcGIS Server is deployed onto an iSCSI array or NFS Server, VMware recommends you have at least a 1 Gbps connection.  If local disks must be used, VMware recommends placing the VMware ESX operating system on disks separate from the VMFS file system where the virtual machines reside.

I recommend using a SAN device for storage whenever possible. Based on tests I have carried out I have seen substantial performance increases using iSCSI over dual 1 Gbps. We are currently using for this for our own environments here.

VMware is a great platform for deploying ArcGIS Server and like I mentioned above this is a fully supported environment.

You can virtualize ESRI ArcGIS Server successfully using VMware Infrastructure. The majority of ArcGIS Server multi-server deployments are good candidates for virtualization and can benefit from advantages offered by a virtualized infrastructure — such as improved management, availability, and scalability — thus reducing TCO.

In order to deploy ArcGIS Server successfully on VMware you should understand the platforms and requirements well. This guide acts as an aid in this process. If you are using VMware as a platform please read and understand this guide. The guide also contains a number of useful links to other resources that might be of interest.

This guide can be download here: http://www.vmware.com/…