Mirantis and IBM set OpenStack benchmark

Mirantis OpenStack 4.0 (Havana), deployed on IBM SoftLayer, showcases that rapid scaling of enterprise private clouds is all in a day’s work for OpenStack.

  • Friday, 28th February 2014 Posted 10 years ago in by Phil Alsop

Mirantis, the pure-play OpenStack vendor, has announced new benchmark results for running an OpenStack cloud at scale, to feed the growing appetite for demanding workloads on enterprise private clouds.


The benchmark, developed to show how quickly and reliably OpenStack could respond to on-demand, real-world workload requirements for provisioning cloud resources, achieved a sustained rate of 9,000 new virtual servers per hour for over eight hours.


The test used the latest Mirantis OpenStack 4.0 (Havana) distribution running on CentOS Ver 6.4, deployed in a high-availability configuration across distributed datacentres. Using 350 physical servers on an IBM SoftLayer bare-metal multi-datacentre cloud, Mirantis OpenStack stood up 75,000 virtual servers, provisioned in parallel stream levels ranging from 100 to 500 at a time.


The key findings of the benchmark test are:
- Enterprises considering where to run large-scale workloads can rely on OpenStack for a private cloud with up to 75,000 virtual servers.
- Running Mirantis OpenStack on IBM SoftLayer provides highly responsive on-demand cloud resources, provisioned at a rate of more than 9,000 virtual servers per hour.
- Mirantis OpenStack and IBM SoftLayer enable resilient multi-datacentre cloud deployments.


Adrian Ionel, CEO of Mirantis said: “We build Mirantis OpenStack for scale and performance, and this benchmark with IBM shows that OpenStack is maturing quickly as a robust private cloud alternative to any public cloud offering. We’re pushing OpenStack to its limits in harsh conditions that mimic real world production workloads and demanding customer use. Our goal is to give our customers reliable and transparent performance data for OpenStack at scale.”


Sesh Murthy, Vice President Advanced Cloud Services at IBM said: “OpenStack is experiencing explosive growth in the cloud market and many companies are looking for not only an easy way to get started, but also an easy way to grow. This new benchmark with Mirantis demonstrates just how powerful and flexible of a foundation SoftLayer can provide for enterprise private cloud deployments of OpenStack at scale.”


Initiated from cloud controllers at its San Jose based datacentre, Mirantis OpenStack was used to drive 250 parallel request streams for starting new virtual machines across a network, to a complex of servers running in Houston, Texas, more than 1,800 miles away. During the course of eight hours, this distributed cloud infrastructure successfully built up 75,000 virtual servers running simultaneously on a remote infrastructure of 350 physical servers.


The virtual servers each included 1 vCPU, 64MB RAM, 2GB storage, with the CPU overcommit rate at 1:32, RAM overcommit at 1:1.5. Real-life workloads generally require much less simultaneous startup, so actual boot times per virtual server could be far faster. The test delivered an average sustained rate of 250 virtual servers bootstrapping every 98.88 seconds, growing linearly to the full population of 75,000 servers booted.