aws

Comparing RDS and Nutanix Cluster performance with HammerDB

Posted on by gary

tl;dr

In a recent experiment using Amazon RDS instance and a VM running in an on-prem Nutanix cluster, both using Skylake class processors with similar clock speeds and vCPU count. The SQLServer database on Nutanix delivered almost 2X the transaction rate as the same workload running on Amazon RDS.

It turns out that migrating an existing SQLServer VM to RDS using the same vCPU count as on-prem may yield only half the expected performance for CPU heavy database workloads. The root cause is how Amazon thinks about vCPU compared to on-prem.

Benchmark Results

HammerDB results from RDS and Nutanix
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Single threaded DB performance on Nutanix HCI

Posted on by gary

tl;dr

A Nutanix cluster can persist a replicated write across two nodes in around 250 uSec which is critical for single-threaded DB write workloads. The performance compares very well with hosted cloud database instances using the same class of processor (db.r5.4xlarge in the figure below). The metrics below are for SQL insert transactions not the underlying IO.

Single threaded commit heavy insert rates. Latency as seen from SQL insert statement.
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Cross rack network latency in AWS

Posted on by gary

I have VMs running on bare-metal instances. Each bare-metal instance is in a separate rack by design (for fault tolerance). The bandwidth is 25GbE however, the response time between the hosts is so high that I need multiple streams to consume that bandwidth.

Compared to my local on-prem lab I need many more streams to get the observed throughput close to the theoretical bandwidth of 25GbE

# iperf StreamsAWS ThroughputOn-Prem Throughput
14.8 Gbit21.4 Gbit
29 Gbit22 Gbit
418 Gbit22.5
823 Gbit23 Gbit
Difference in throughput for a 25GbE network on-premises Vs AWS cloud (inter-rack)