[THIN] OT: Review of ARMTech for Windows - Desktop Edition
- From: Jeff Pitsch <jepitsch@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 25 Oct 2005 18:51:16 -0400
I thought everyone might be interested in this. I'm also posting this on my
website. If anyone has questions or anything, please feel free to let me
know.
iForum came and went and my thoughts on it are fairly well known. One of
the aspects I didn't put in my review, and I should have, were the
vendors. There
were some very good vendors out there with some great products. I always
like hitting the vendors because that's typically where you can find those
little gems that make it worthwhile. This year I happened to stop at Aurema
and chatted with them for a bit. One of the goodies I was given was a 30-day
evaluation disk for ARMTech for Windows – Desktop Edition. At the time, I
didn't think much of it. When I got home, though, I decided to try it on my
two laptops. The results have amazed me.
*My Setup*
As I said, I have two laptops. One is my personal laptop and the other is
my work laptop. My personal laptop is a first generation Dell XPS with a
3.4ghz Intel processor, 1gb of RAM, 256mb ATI Mobility Radeon 9800, and a
60gb 7200k hard drive. The work laptop is an IBM R51 with a 1.7ghz Intel
Pentium M processor, 2gb of RAM, 32mb ATI Mobility Radeon 9000 and a 60gb
hard drive.
*What is it and what does it do*
Aurema is probably best known right now for being the company that licensed
their CPU sharing technology to Citrix. Last year they released a version of
their product for the Windows Desktop. As with the server versions of the
product, this version allows you to control CPU allocation and memory
consumption. You have as much or as little control as you want.
*What does it mean?*
First let's get some nomenclature out of the way. A resource consumer is
anything that takes up cpu, real memory, or virtual memory. A share is, to
quote "Shares are portions of CPU resource controlled by ARMTech and
assigned to resource consumers. The worth of a resource consumer's shares is
dynamic and is calculated at regular intervals of 400 milliseconds." A share
basically makes sure that everything has an equal share of the processor. A
reservation, on the other hand, is used to guarantee a percentage of the
processor to the resource consumer.
*Installation*
* *
The installation was a straight forward Windows installation. The
installation turns on CPU sharing but disables all memory optimizations. CPU
sharing is split into shares, by default, and is set to 8 for all resource
consumers. Out of the box, no process will be able to take over the
system. Everything
gets a fair share of the processor.
*Configuration*
* *
Configuration is done through an MMC snap-in. The interface itself is very
simple and I was able to figure it out pretty quickly without looking at the
manual. While the interface is simple, there is a lot of power available to
you.
There are three main areas of the ARMTech console: Capacity
Planning/Billing, Administration, and Policy.
Capacity Planning/billing allows you to setup a database for purposes of
planning and even billing if needed. By default, it uses a local Access
database but can easily be moved to a MSSQL server or Oracle server.
Administration allows you to control memory optimizations, security
policies, logging and replication of settings to other desktops. The memory
optimizations are fully controlled from this area and there are default
reports to view potential memory savings as well as other details of the
memory optimization process. Network synchronization allows you to push the
settings to as many computers as you want. You can also view the results of
a push to make sure that it succeeds. The security policy should look very
familiar to windows administrators as it mimics the security area of Group
Policy. You can choose a policy and then assign groups or users to it. It
appears an administrator can control just about everything. Logging is to a
text file and can be set to no logging, errors only or verbose.
The bulk of the work is done in the Policy section. This is where you
configure the CPU shares and reservations and memory (virtual and real)
limitations. This is where you can really get down and tweak things. First
off, you have the overall global policies. This is where you turn on/off
memory limitation enforcement, cpu sharing, and type of policies amongst
others. Then you have the meat of the application. As I said, by default all
processes (in fact, you can specify a directory or filter with wildcards so
you don't have to do each process individually), or resource consumers, are
given a default share of 8. Here is where you can configure a process to get
more shares or reservations. When you configure a resource consumer you can
also specify memory limitations for real and virtual memory; no more
application memory leaks! I won't get into everything you can do, it would
take way too much time, but suffice it to say, you have a lot of power at
your fingertips to tweak your system.
*Documentation*
* *
The documentation is actually pretty good. The help files are filled with
information and the CD comes with everything from getting started guides to
advanced concepts to tutorials.
*The Test*
The first thing I tested this on was my work laptop. I started a download,
virus scan, compiling a fairly large program, and Word. I was able to work
in Word and create a document without any interruption. Everything finished
quickly as well and there was no noticeable difference in the time taken to
accomplish tasks.
The second thing I did was test this on my home laptop. My home laptop is a
portable desktop (obviously). So the first thing I did was take the default
install of ARMTech and do what any good geek does. I started playing games. The
first game I booted up was The Sims 2. What a difference it made. One thing
I've noticed about the Sims was that every time an expansion came out, it
would slow down a little more. The game runs flawlessly now at high
resolution and high graphic detail. Suffice to say, I was very impressed. So
the next thing I did was take a computer killer game called Battlefield 2. This
game is notorious for being a hog and needing some high end software to run. I
have been able to run this game in the past with about 25 frames per second
as my top result. I loaded up the game and was amazed to find frame rates of
35 to 45. So the next step was to give Battlefield more shares. I bumped up
the shares to 64 for Battlefield and achieved a consistent 45 frames per
second. For those non-gamers out there, that's a mighty big lift in
performance.
For both laptops, performance also feels much smoother.
*The Downside of it all*
In this world nothing is perfect, but I have to admit, there isn't a whole
lot to complain about here. One problem I found was the inability to
remotely connect to another workstation from the MMC. From a home
perspective, this isn't a big deal but from an enterprise perspective it is
definitely a big miss. Another issue with the current product is the
assigning of rights to other users and the replication of policies. It would
be nice to have a more centralized interface for these functions. While you
can replicate to other workstations, the only way of knowing what you did
and who has what policies is through the reporting. This is fine if you are
replicating the same policy everywhere but what if you want a set of users
to have one set of policies and another set of users a different set of
policies. You have to manually keep track of those. However, Aurema told me
to expect to see a management console in the next few months.
*Pricing*
* *
Pricing is currently $60 per computer. IMHO, it's a steal at that price for
the performance enhancements I've seen.
Jeff Pitsch
http://www.sbcgatekeeper.com
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