Despite its current beta status, the VMware benchmarking approach called VMmark is already being adopted by Dell, which published a very interesting page with performances results achieved with new PowerEdge:
Dell has recently measured various configurations of two- and four-socket PowerEdge servers running VMware ESX Server 3 using a beta version of the VMmark benchmark. The graph below shows a 4-socket PowerEdge 6950 with dual-core AMD Opteron processors has 57% higher virtualization performance than a 2-socket PowerEdge 2950 with dual-core Intel Xeon® series 5100 processors.2 The 2-socket PowerEdge 2900 with new quad-core Intel Xeon 5300 series processors shows 51% better performance.
Equally impressive, all three 8-core servers were able to support the same number of heavily-loaded virtual machines.
Read the whole paper at source.
At the same time the VMware benchmarking team published on the corporate blog some results obtained with new HP DL380 G5 (same machines virtualization.info is offering on its new online facility Rent-A-Lab):
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The mail server scales perfectly from 1 to 2 tiles and then improves by another 25%, equal to the 25% increase in CPU utilization, when a third tile is added to fully saturate the CPU on the system. The java server scales perfectly up to 3 tiles. In this case, each java server VM is allocated sufficient CPU shares to achieve full performance and excellent scaling even with 3 tiles due to the think-time constraints built into VMmark. Both the database server and the web server exhibit roughly linear scaling from 1 to 2 tiles…
Read the whole article at source.