CSC570 Lab 14 (from Chapter 14)

EXTRA CREDIT LAB DUE BY Sunday, December 14, at midnight CST.

Understanding Virtual Machine Performance

Following the text on pg 251-255
Before we begin the lab, we want to give our Windows 7 VM an additional core (so
that the CPU will not hit 100% when we run the performance benchmark).
1. As we did in the Lab 7, with your Windows 7 VM powered off, select your machine and
right-click to bring up the options menu, select (click on)Edit Settings:

2. Highlight your CPU and you should see the CPU options (like below). Change the Number
of cores per socket to 2. Then click OK. Your machine should re-configure.

3. After your machine re-configures, power on your VM.

4. Launch VMware Player and power on your Ubuntu VM.

5. The first thing we have to do is download the benchmarking package on our Ubuntu
machine. Open a browser window and navigate to http://dacapobench.org/ . the download
link is in the left side menu bar. The file you want to download is the dacapo jar on
sourceforge: dacapo-9.12-bach.jar

6. Save the file to the default directory. Close your browser window when the download
completes.
7. You will now need to install the Java JRE. Open the Terminal (shortcut keys: ctrl + alt + T)
and enter the command: sudo apt-get install default-jre

It will fetch, download and install the latest version of the java runtime environment.

8. Now navigate to your download directory. The command for changing directories is CD.
The default location for your downloads is /home/username/Downloads. On my machine,
my user name is lc, so my command is:
cd /home/lc/Downloads

9. Execute the Benchmark by entering the command: java jar dacapo-9.12-bach.jar h2

It takes several minutes to complete the benchmark. When it is finished, you should get a
similar output to this screen:

Take a screenshot of your output and paste it on your worksheet (Item 1.)

10.Now that we know our benchmark is working, lets look at the performance of our VM as
the Ubuntu machine sees it. To do this we will run the System Monitor. Click on the Ubuntu

Dash home icon

and type system monitor in the search bar. Click on it to open the
system monitor. Resize your windows so that you can re-enter the benchmark command
and still get to the system monitor output:

With nothing running, your CPU should show around 30%-40% utilization; memory should
be well below 30%.
11.Re-Run the benchmark and watch the memory and cpu in the system monitor:

Notice your CPU usage is 100% and your memory usage has greatly increased.

Take a screen shot of the system monitor during the benchmark run and paste it into your
worksheet (Item 2.)
When the benchmark completes, your usage for both CPU and memory should return to
normal.

12.Now we want to see what is happening to the system that is hosting this VM (our Windows
7 VM). We can do this by looking at the Performance Monitor in windows. Click the start
icon on your windows VM and enter perf in the search box. This will bring up the

monitor:
When the performance monitor window opens, select the Performance Monitor graph tool
from the Monitoring Tools folder on the left menu bar:

This will open the CPU usage graph. Reduce this window so that you can see it and your
Ubuntu VM:

Notice, with nothing but the VMware player running, the average CPU usage is ~10-20%.
13.Now run the benchmark on the Ubuntu VM again. Your Ubuntu CPU usage will spike to
100% again. But the windows CPU usage will not go above 60%. Try to position you
various windows to get a nice screen shot like below, which show Ubuntu at 100% and
Windows at around 50%:

Take a screen shot, like above if you can, showing the Windows Performance Monitor and
the Ubuntu System Monitor under the Benchmark load and paste it on your Worksheet
(Item 3).
This clearly illustrate the difference between performance inside a VM and outside on the
host.

As VM administrators we must monitor BOTH. The performance within the VM controls the
users perceived performance of the application running on the VM. The performance
outside (on the host) is what we look at to provision hardware for our overall virtualization
infrastructure.
Please make certain to close your programs and shut-down your VMs after you complete
the lab.
14.

Module 7 Lab: Linux Performance Monitoring Worksheet

1. Screenshot of your dacapo Benchmark output:

2. Screenshot of the Ubuntu System Monitor output during the Benchmark run:

3. Screenshot of the Windows Performance Monitor output during the Benchmark run: