Lenovo ThinkAgile VX V3 Systems Enhanced with New AMD and VMware Technologies

Accelerating Hybrid Cloud Adoption: The growth of technology, cloud and data-driven ecosystems bring the need for on-premise infrastructure to meet hybrid cloud requirements. Servers need to have virtualization and hybrid cloud capabilities – and be able to scale and operationalize quickly. Also, due to cost and operational factors a variety of workloads are being migrated back to on-premises infrastructure. This trend means businesses need faster servers and storage to achieve the performance and low latency required.

Infrastructure and Workloads Modernization: Many business-critical applications - database, VDI, data science and AI/ML workloads - need increased processing and data storage capabilities. Ever growing data and AI/ML workloads require processors with built-in acceleration and servers with high-speed memory, network adapters, drives and interconnects that are pre-tested and pre-validated engineered solution to reduce deployment complexities.

Lenovo ThinkAgile VX635 V3 (1U 1P), VX645 V3 (1U, 2P), VX655 V3 (2U, 1P) and VX665 V3 (2U, 2P) hyperconverged systems are featured with 4th generation AMD EPYC™ processors and VMware vSAN™ 8 to address these customer trends and lower operations management. The new AMD EPYC 9004 family of processors offer up to 96 cores, up to 3.6 GHz clock speed, up to 6TB memory, and support PCIe 5.0 and NVMe drives.

ThinkAgile VX V3 systems support VMware’s new Extended Storage Architecture (ESA) with NVMe memory in addition to OSA (Original Storage Architecture) with all-flash or hybrid configurations.

Lenovo ThinkAgile VX V3 with AMD EPYC 9004 systems based on VMware vSAN provide the ideal cloud-ready foundation for critical applications like Database, Big Data and AI/ML solutions and provide greater consolidation for many workloads. They drive superior performance through support for higher cores, AVX-512 instruction set to accelerate performance and new virtualization features.

Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series V3 servers powered by AMD EPYC 9004 processors provide increased performance, bandwidth and speed than ThinkAgile V2 with AMD EPYC 9003 processors. The 4th Gen processors are modernized to support more cores and performance and accelerators. ThinkAgile VX systems support 1U 1 socket, 1U 2 socket, 2U 1 socket, and 2U 2 socket form factors for flexible and scalable deployment for small and medium enterprise requirements.

All ThinkAgile VX V3 models support vSAN All Flash and Hybrid deployment and VMware vSAN Original Storage Architecture and Express Storage Architecture. vSAN ESA is with a single storage tier and no cache drive or disk groups are required.

AMD EPYC 9004 processors:

• Support up to 96 cores per processor, core speeds of up to 4.1 GHz, and TDP ratings of up to 360W.
• 1 Socket systems support up to 12 TruDDR5 memory DIMMs and 2 Socket systems support up to 24 TruDDR5 memory DIMMs with two processors. Each processor has 12 memory channels and 1 DIMM per channel. With 1 DIMM installed per channel (12 DIMMs total per processor), memory operates at 4800 MHz.
• Supports 12x NVMe drives without oversubscription of PCIe lanes

AMD EPYC 9004 processors support more cores, DDR5 and enhanced features for virtualization and acceleration and provide better performance than AMD EPYC 9003 processors. Here is the comparison between AMD EPYC 7763 64C vs. AMD EPYC 9654 96C.

• Up to 15% increase in performance per watt efficiency
• Up to 85% increase in middle tier application transaction throughput performance
• Up to 60% increase in high performance compute workload (GFLOPS)
• Up to 90% increase in integer and floating point operations
• Up to 100% increase in memory bandwidth performance

Lenovo and AMD teams performed the Login Enterprise benchmark for the knowledge worker profile on ThinkAgile VX665 V3 with AMD EPYC 4th Generation processors. The benchmark details are given below.

Login Enterprise VDI Benchmark

• Knowledge worker 3 VCPU, 2GB Memory and 60 GB disk
• Persistent desktops, Roaming profile
• Horizon Instant Clones
• VMware ESXi, 8.0.1, 21495797
• Horizon 8.9.0 version 2303
• Windows 10 Office 2007

Results

Figures 1 and 2 shows Login Enterprise VSIMax and EUX score for the knowledge worker tests.

• The test with AMD EPYC 9354 32C achieved VSIMax of 292 per node at 100% CPU utilization. On average, 220 virtual desktops can be hosted per node considering headroom for growth and failover scenarios.
• The test with AMD EPYC 9474F 48C achieved VSIMax of 440 per node and we can size to 330 virtual desktops per host with 75-80% CPU utilization.
• vSAN ESA supports up to 500 virtual machines per host and using 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors with high core count allows you to achieve more density. Based on the test results, VDI density can be increased either by scaling up with high core processors or by scaling out with more nodes per cluster.
• The EUX score is above 8 at the beginning of the test and it shows 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors provides lower latency for VDI applications and improves end user experience. The application response is gradually decreasing after 75% CPU utilization and EUX score is above 6 even at 100% CPU utilization which proves 4th Gen AMD EPYC Processors can deliver application with lower latency during peak load scenarios.
• AMD EPYC 4th Generation processors with higher number of cores can provide up to 2x-4x more density than the previous generation processors.
• ThinkAgile VX V3 systems with AMD EPYC 9004 processors and vSAN ESA can provide linear scaling for many virtual desktop profiles.
• Enabling RDMA can result ~5% more virtual desktops and it requires 25GbE/100GbE network.

Figure 1. VMware Horizon Virtual Desktop Performance with AMD EPYC 9354 32C vSAN ESA Cluster

Figure 2. VMware Horizon Virtual Desktop Performance with AMD EPYC 9474F 48C vSAN ESA Cluster

vSAN ESA is single tier storage solution composed of NVMe drives to provide better performance.

• Minimum 1 drive is needed and supported up to 36 drives.
• Minimum 10GbE connectivity is required and the cards should support RDMA (RoCE v2) to leverage RDMA. It is recommended to use 25GbE/100GbE to achieve lower latency and end user experience.
• RAID-5 is default and recommended configuration for vSAN ESA. It supports RAID-1(mirroring) and RAID-6 which are enabled through storage policies.
• The limits may vary for different vSphere versions and ThinkAgile VX platforms, so refer appropriate product guides.

The table below shows the list of RDMA supported NIC cards recommended for ESA solution.

VMware vSAN DPp supports adding third party Kubernetes operators, storage classes and vCenter services to provide object storage for containers and integrate with VMware Cloud Foundation with VMware Tanzu. It enables running stateful services and is supported on both vSAN Shared Nothing Architecture (SNA) and vSAN Direct configurations. The complete lifecycle management and maintenance operations are integrated and it provides a seamless experience to run third party Kubernetes services.

ThinkAgile VX V3 systems come with an option to buy the following software from Lenovo:

• VMware vSAN: Standard, Advanced, Enterprise, Enterprise Plus, ROBO or Desktop
• VMware vCenter Server: Foundation or Standard
• VMware vSphere: Standard, Enterprise Plus or ROBO
• HCI Kit: Essentials, Standard, Advanced, Enterprise or ROBO
• VMware Horizon: Standard, Advanced or Enterprise
• VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF): Basic, Standard, Advanced, Enterprise or for VDI
• VMware Tanzu Basic
• VMware NSX-T

ThinkAgile VX V3 Integrated systems and certified nodes with VMware vSAN 8 and 4th Gen AMD EPYC processors provide superior performance, scalability and higher consolidation for different workloads. ThinkAgile VX systems are prevalidated and factory installed with VMware vSphere and VMware vSAN. VX systems simplify deployment and enable applications to address latency and security issues seamlessly. These next generation engineered hardware and software solutions from Lenovo and AMD are a one-stop scalable solution for modern application development and hybrid cloud scenarios with reduced TCO.

Lenovo is a US$70 billion revenue Fortune Global 500 company serving customers in 180 markets around the world. Focused on a bold vision to deliver smarter technology for all, we are developing world-changing technologies that power (through devices and infrastructure) and empower (through solutions, services and software) millions of customers every day.

For More Information

To learn more about Lenovo workload solutions on ThinkAgile VX635 V3, VX645 V3, VX655 V3 and VX665 V3 servers, contact your Lenovo Business Partner or visit: https://www.lenovo.com/systems/solutions

References:

Lenovo ThinkAgile VX635 V3 1U Integrated System and Certified Node: https://lenovopress.lenovo.com/lp1689

Lenovo ThinkAgile VX645 V3 1U Integrated System and Certified Node: https://lenovopress.lenovo.com/lp1648

Lenovo ThinkAgile VX655 V3 2U Integrated System and Certified Node: https://lenovopress.lenovo.com/lp1690

Lenovo ThinkAgile VX665 V3 2U Integrated System and Certified Node: https://lenovopress.lenovo.com/lp1641