While Intel prepares to launch its first octal-core CPU (codename Nehalem-EX) , which will potentially trigger a price increase in vSphere licensing, VMware publishes a new benchmark on current Xeon 5500 servers.
This time the company focuses on high throughput web performance, running the SPECweb2005 benchmark against a HP ProLiant DL380 G6 machine equipped with two quad-core Intel Xeon X5570 CPUs @ 2.933GHz and 96GB memory.
The system above, powered by vSphere 4.0, run four virtual machines with 4 vCPUs and 21GB vRAM each, hosting a copy of paravirtualized 64bit Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux 11 plus Rock Webserver and Rock JSP server.
Such system, thanks to paravirtualization drivers, the VMware NetQueue technology, the Intel VMDirectPath technology (part of VT-d) and the Intel 82598EB 10 Gigabit AF network interface cards, recorded a benchmark score of 62,296, equal to 85% of native performance.
The four VMs were able to serve from 60,000 to 100,000 simultaneous users:
