Recently Dell published a very interesting benchmark measuring the Microsoft Hyper-V performance on its new R900 server (with Intel Quad-Core and Six-Core Xeon) against HP ProLiant DL585 G2 (with Intel Quad-Core).
The top R900 system features 4 x E7450 Xeon @ 2.4Ghz and 128GB RAM.
Such system handled 40 Hyper-V virtual machines (1 vCPU and 2GB vRAM), each running a Windows Server 2008 64bit guest OS with SQL Server 2005 64bit.
The overall CPU utilization with such configuration hits 80%, serving 74,084 orders per minute.
Compared with the other two systems this R900 performed 27% better than the HP machine (which can serve no more than 26 virtual machines) and 8% better than the other Dell machine with Quad-Core CPUs (serving no more than 30 virtual machines).
This is one of the first performance study for Hyper-V and it’s worth of a full read.