Hardware and software configuration

The hardware and software installation characteristics of the used test environment are illustrated. Also the configurations of the virtualized environments and the z/VM host system are described.

Figure 1 shows a symbolic representation of the used hardware and software, including the virtual system configurations.

The top part of Figure 1 depicts virtual systems, detailing the amount of virtual memory (yellow) and the number of virtual processors (blue) configured for each virtual system. For details, see Virtual system configuration. Network connectivity for virtual systems is shown below their depiction. Note that these virtual configurations remained unchanged for all performed tests.

The middle part of Figure 1 depicts the amount of memory and the amount of processors configured for use by the z/VM host system. For details, see z/VM host configuration. The black marks depict the various amounts of memory and processors that were used for the performed tests.

The lower left part of Figure 1 depicts the storage resources in use by the z/VM host and by the virtual systems.

The lower right part of Figure 1 shows the client system that was used to drive the database workload and the transactional WAS workload. In fact, the client system emulates workload requests that would normally result from large amounts of human interaction.

For each workload, one or more virtual systems running Linux® on System z® with following middle-ware or workload drivers were needed:

• Database BI workload
  • Oracle Database
• Transactional WAS workload
  • IBM® Http Server (IHS)
  • WebSphere® Application Server (WAS)
  • DB2® database
• File system I/O workload
  • fio
• Java™ workload
  • Java transactional workload application
• Network workload
  • uperf client (network client workload driver)
  • uperf server (network server component)