VMware vSphere(TM) 4 Sets New Records in Virtualization Performance

“VMware vSphere 4 is setting new records in virtualization performance as the result of continuous improvements to the software and years of diligent work with hardware vendors,” said Dr. Stephen Herrod, chief technology officer of VMware. “This translates into higher consolidation ratios and application performance that meets, and in some cases exceeds, that of physical deployments. VMware vSphere 4 helps take performance objections off the table for even the highest-end applications, allowing the virtualization benefits of higher availability, security, and automation to shine in the cloud.”

VMware has demonstrated new record performance results and new performance maximums with VMware vSphere 4 including:

• Record number of transactions per second. New performance throughput record of 8,900 database transactions per second, as demonstrated on Oracle database with an OLTP workload modeled after TPC-C*.
• Record low overhead compared to native. New performance efficiencies with resource-intensive SQL Server databases utilizing 8 CPUs per VM and running at 90 percent of native or better as tested by an OLTP workload modeled after TPC-E*.
• Record I/O throughput. 3x increase in the maximum recorded I/O operations per second. VMware vSphere 4 triples the maximum recorded I/O operations per second to more than 300,000. For comparison purposes, according to data from VMware Capacity Planner, most demanding databases that are on Intel architecture servers usually require a few tens of thousands of I/O operations per second. VMware vSphere 4 also includes a newly rewritten storage stack that demonstrates full wire speed on 10 Gbps iSCSI connections.
• Record network throughput. Improved virtual machine networking and support for NetQueue that shows up to 100 percent improvement in network throughput and fully saturating hardware bus limits of 30 Gpbs.
• Estimated 30 percent improved performance for Citrix XenApp

These record breaking performance improvements are the result of unique core technologies and architecture improvements in VMware vSphere 4, including:

• Networking performance. VMware vSphere 4 comes with enhancements to NetQueue – VMware’s support for Intel’s VM-optimized networking technology VMDq. vmxnet3, the third generation of VMware’s paravirtualized virtual machine network drivers, and with optional receive-side scaling (RSS), which additionally speeds up network throughput.
• Storage I/O performance. VMware vSphere 4 incorporates a new paravirtualized virtual machine storage device called pvscsi which improves the throughput for storage access. It also implements advanced concurrency I/O, which optimizes storage throughput for high-transaction-rate workloads.
• Improved consolidation ratios. VMware vSphere 4 includes a greatly optimized processor scheduler which is now cache hierarchy-aware and can deliver more database transactions, web page requests, and email messages than any other hypervisor.
• Support for hardware assist for virtualization. VMware has been working with processor vendors AMD and Intel, to incorporate their hardware assist for virtualization in to our software. VMware was the first virtualization vendor to support first generation enhancements from AMD and Intel in 2006. In 2008, VMware became the first to support the second generation AMD-Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) technology, and is now the first and only to support Intel’s Extended Page Tables (EPT) and VMDq technology.

Scalability improvements

VMware vSphere 4 also introduces new scalability capabilities. By expanding server resource support to 1 TB of RAM and 64 logical processing cores, some of the very largest and most powerful servers can be leveraged for virtual workloads. With support for up to 256 GB of RAM and eight virtual CPUs per virtual machine, nearly 100 percent of resource-intensive workloads such as high-end databases are suitable for virtualization.

VMware vSphere 4 is expected to be generally available later in Q2 2009.

Additional information on VMware performance can be found at http://www.vmware.com/technology/performance/index.html.

*Non-comparable implementation of TPC-C workload; results not TPC-C compliant; deviations from the spec: batch benchmark, undersized database not TPC-C compliant.