VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW) the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced that it has set a world record in web server performance on a 16 core server with results submitted for Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) ® consortium’s SPECweb2005, a benchmark for evaluating the performance of World Wide Web Servers.
The SPECweb2005 workload benchmark gives web users the most objective and representative benchmark for measuring a system's ability to act as a web server and is used by all major vendors as a basis for comparing platform capabilities and ability to support web traffic. When using the highly network-intensive SPECweb2005 workload to compare performance of VMware Infrastructure 3 to that of a similarly configured native – i.e., unvirtualized – server, the results on VMware’s virtualization platform in some cases exceeded any number recorded on any physical machine. VMware’s aggregate SPECweb2005 performance of 44,000 is higher than any 16-core system has ever recorded.
A SPECweb score is produced by applying a geometric mean to the measured number of simultaneous web server connections on three separate workloads. On one of these, the E-Commerce workload, VMware’s submission supported 69,525 simultaneous connections. To put this number in perspective, an online retailer might expect no more than 1 percent of its customers to connect to its web servers at one time. Using the configuration reported by VMware, this online retailer could support nearly seven million customers from a single physical server. These results further demonstrate the ability of virtualized environments to run applications with performance that is equal to or better than native systems.
VMware’s score on this highly relevant E-Commerce workload of SPECweb 2005 represented more simultaneous web connections than has ever been reported on a 16-core system. With 69,525 connections, it was only improved upon by 75 more connections by a very recent 24-core system. As the vast majority of web farms in today’s online retailers use dual core, two socket systems, migrating to the configuration submitted by VMware could reduce the server count by more than 75%.
“This new high water mark with web server performance is another demonstration of VMware’s leadership in virtualizing all types of mission-critical applications,” says Dr. Stephen Herrod, chief technology officer, VMware. ”By achieving numbers that exceed anything ever published on hardware of the same core count, VMware Infrastructure proves once again that it can meet the most extreme performance needs of business applications.”
This world record joins another set in 2008, in which Microsoft Exchange virtualized by VMware more than doubled the native capacity of mailboxes running natively on 16-core systems. These results show why customers increasingly use VMware Infrastructure to run business-critical applications including SAP, Exchange, SQL and Oracle, in order to deliver them as dynamic, cost-efficient, and reliable IT services to better support business requirements. In addition to the better-than-native performance benefits, VMware Infrastructure delivers dramatically reduced capital and operating costs, lower maintenance costs, higher availability, and fault tolerance.
