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Virtual Performance

Scott Drummonds works in a variety of performance areas at VMware: VDI, application best practices, competitive analysis, customer performance investigations, and outward bound communications. This blog will detail some of my musings on these subjects.

2 Posts tagged with the specweb tag
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Last week Chris Wolf moderated a debate on virtual platform performance between myself and Simon Crosby, CTO of Citrix. A recording of the debate was put online shortly after its conclusion.

Simon and I disagreed on a few issues and demonstrated different strategies in the discussion. My goal in representing the fine efforts of our performance team was to show to the audience VMware's commitment to product performance. This commitment is demonstrated through a never ending series of benchmark publications and continual product improvement. In the years since I joined VMware we have quantified ESX's ability to serve web pages (SPECweb), enable massive numbers of database transactions (TPC-C, with disclaimers), and establish industry leadership in consolidated workloads (VMmark). As we released these and dozens of other numbers, Citrix has remained silent on its own product's performance.

I was pleased that the event's format gave me the opportunity to discuss our accomplishments. My only regret was that I lacked the time to dispense with the most important of several factual inaccuracies from Simon. At one point in the discussion Simon claimed that VMmark is not run by anyone except VMware. In fact, it is closer to the truth to say that VMmark is run by everyone except VMware. A quick view of the VMmark results page will show results from every major server vendor, with no submissions from VMware.

Thanks to the Burton Group and Chris Wolf for letting me participate. It was a pleasure.

0 Comments Permalink Tags: vmmark, specweb, citrix, xenserver, oracle
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If any of you have heard me speak in the numerous events I've done in the past two years, you may have heard me detail the areas where virtualization performance can exceed native. There are scalability limitations in traditional software that make nearly every enterprise application fall short of utilizing the cores that are available to them today. As the core explosion continues, this under-utilization of processors will worsen. Here is a graph that we've been showing to illustrate that point:

http://communities.vmware.com/servlet/JiveServlet/downloadImage/5369/core_explosion.png

In 2008 I visited VMworld Europe and showed on using multiple virtual machines on a single physical host could circumvent the limitations in today's software. In that experiment we showed that 16,000 Exchange mailboxes could be fit on a single physical server when no one had ever put more than 8,000 on in a single native instance. We called this approach designing by "building blocks" and were confident that as the core count continued to increase, we'd continue to expose more applications whose performance could be improved through virtualization.

On Thursday last week SPEC accepted VMware's submission of a SPECweb2005 result. And last night we posted an article on VROOM! detailing the experiment and providing information on the submission. This submission is an incredible first for us: not only have we shown that we can circumvent limitations in web servers, but we posted a world record performance number in the process. Of course, if any of you have seen Sreekanth Setty's presentation at VMworld on his ongoing work on SPECweb2005, this result wouldn't surprise you:

http://communities.vmware.com/servlet/JiveServlet/downloadImage/5370/specweb_scaling.png

Getting a benchmark standardization body like SPEC to approve these results isn't always easy. Most of the industry remains stuck in a mode of thinking of performance as a single instance's maximum throughput. But given the scale-out capabilities of a large number of enterprise applications I'd argue that benchmarking should account for scale-out capabilities on a single box. VMware's customers follow this practice faithfully in sizing their deployments to match their needs and everyone wants to know the platform's ability to handle this use-case. SPEC's willingness to accept results showing building blocks on a single host is commendable and progressive. As more benchmarks approve submissions like these VMware will continue to be able to show record numbers.

0 Comments Permalink Tags: specweb, web, performance

Virtual Performance

Scott Drummonds works in a variety of performance areas at VMware: VDI, application best practices, competitive analysis, customer performance investigations, and outward bound communications. This blog will detail some of my musings on these subjects.

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