In May 2007 Sun published an interesting 18-pages paper about scalability capabilities of its Sun Fire X4600.
The paper is interesting mainly because Sun used VMware VMmark as benchmarking platform, joining a group of vendors (Dell was the first one) who trusts virtualization vendor measurement approach:
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The VMmark benchmark gives IT organizations a way to objectively compare the scalability of different virtualization platforms. A beta version of the VMmark benchmark was used to assess the combination of VMware Infrastructure 3 software, the Sun Fire X4600 M2 server, and the Sun StorageTek 6540 Array configured with varying amounts of CPU, memory, I/O, and storage resources.
The benchmark runs a highly resource-intensive workload on the server to measure scalability characteristics. The results demonstrate that a four-socket Sun Fire X4600 M2 server can manage twice the number of active virtual machines as a two-socket system. An eight-socket server can handle 3.5 times the number of virtual machines as a two-socket system.
The benchmark’s VMmark performance metric shows that performance scales with server capacity as well: a four-socket server scaled to 1.93 times that of the two-socket server, and the eight-socket server scaled to 3.07 times the two-socket server…
Read the whole paper at source.