TPCx-HCI

TPCx-HCI is a Benchmark for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
The TPC Express Benchmark HCI (TPCx-HCI) benchmark measures the performance of Hyper-Converged Infrastructure clusters under a demanding database workload. It stresses the virtualized hardware and software of converged storage, networking, and compute resources of the HCI platform. The TPCx-HCI benchmark is based on the TPCx-V benchmark, and uses the same kit as TPCx-V, but the results of these benchmarks are not comparable. The number of VMs is calculated differently for the two benchmarks, even on similar hardware. The TPCx-HCI workload is database-centric and models many properties of cloud services, such as multiple VMs running at different load demand levels, and large fluctuations in the load level of each VM. The TPCx-HCI benchmarking kit, which was developed from scratch, is a complete end-to-end kit that loads the databases, runs the benchmark, validates the results, and even performs many of the routine audit steps.

Two unique characteristics of TPCx-HCI are:
  1. It has an elastic workload that varies the load delivered to each of the VMs by as much as 16x, while maintaining a constant load at the cluster level. Sustaining optimal throughput for this elastic workload on a multi-node HCI cluster would typically benefit from frequent migrations of VMs to rebalance the load across nodes. This property measures the efficiency of VM migration as well as the uniformity of access to data from all the nodes.
  2. In the Data Accessibility test of TPCx-HCI, a node is powered down ungracefully, and the benchmark continues to run on the other nodes. The test sponsor has to include a throughput graph for this test, demonstrating the impact on performance, as well as report the recovery time to regain resilience.
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