Performance differences between ESX and HyperV

[Noyzyboy]

Hi all,

Is there anyone out there who might be able to shed light on a VMware technical issues we are having?

We have a customer that has two very similar spec servers one running VMware ESX 5i and the other running Server 2008 R2 HyperV. Each server has a single CPU VM running on it running Server 2008 R2 with identical RAM amounts. HyperV server has Intel X5650 processors, ESX Server has Intel E5-2630 procs.

The HyperV VM under load shows about 50% less CPU utilisation than the ESX Server VM under the same load even though the VMs are very similarly specified. Both are running the same application and the same load.

The customer has asked us to explain why there is such a marked difference.

Any help would be  greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Richard

[mcowger]

The X series part has a somewhat faster clock speed.

Are you certain the power saving settings are identical?  Also, CPU utilization is dependent on generated load from the application - I'd question the assertion that the application is really doing the exact same thing...

[Noyzyboy]

Thanks for that. Do you mean power savings within the Windows VM or on the hardware itself?

I'm also questioning the application as well but the customer runs two identical production lines and either server can control either line, we can swap VMs from one production line to the other and the loading issue follows the ESX VM.

[mcowger · Accepted solution]

I mean on the hardware itself.

[sidbryd]

This would be the physical power settings on the hardware, these should be set to high performance, here is the linke to the best practice document for VMware:

www.vmware.com/files/pdf/hpm-perf-vsphere5.pdf

Sid

[Noyzyboy]

Thanks, will get this checked out.

[Noyzyboy]

OK so the ESX Servers (Dell R720s) are all set to maxium power settings, any other ideas?

[Noyzyboy]

Hi all,

Just to let you know I changed the System Profile settings to "Performance" on the BIOS and this seems to have resolved the issues. Thanks all for pointing me in the right direction.

Richard