Virtual Web server surpasses physical one by work speed

28th February 2009

The company VMware reported on the record speed of performance shown by the hypervisor ESX Server. For the first time, a virtual Linux-server under ESX Server beat a physical Linux-machine with the same configuration in the popular test for web servers SPECweb2005.
For a comparative test two systems of 16 cores each were chosen. The test configuration contained 128 GB of RAM and 4 hard disks of 73 GB each. In addition, two disk systems EMC Clariion CX3-40 Fibre Channel SAN (14.6 TB on the total) were connected to the virtualized system. ESX Server 3.5 Update 3 acted as a virtualization platform.
The physical Linux-system has been installed on the server HP DL580 (4 Intel Harpertown 4-core processors). DL580 server contained 64 GB of RAM, 8 hard disks and two disk arrays MSA 70 (2.1 TB on the total). Thus, the virtualized platform surpassed the physical one 2 times by RAM and a 7 times by media capacity, with approximately equal processor power.
During the test 15 virtual machines on the server DL585 G5 could process 80'000 simultaneous connections to a personal account, 69'525 sessions of e-commerce and 33'941 support sessions. The average rating was 44'000, while the physical system showed rating 40'046 under the same load.