I would like to hear from anyone that is currently using intel 5500 procs in servers for vmware currently. I would like to know how much better performance of the vm's running on the 5500 procs is compared to 5400/5300 procs. Is the performance for th vm's noticable or the same but you can just run more vm's.
Hopefully some good responses will come from this question. I just ordered a couple of blades with the new 55xx series. All previous benchmarking I've read suggested 1vcpu on a 55xx processor might even match that of 2vcpu 54xx processor. I guess if nobody has some real world numbers, I'll do what I can to report back performance results
There are no "real" numbers, you have to test performance in your environment with your applications to make numbers real.
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MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009
There are also loads of articles on 5400 vs. 5500 generation performance if you just google it, and all of them points to huge differences not only because of the processor but also due to new motherboard chipset generations, DDR3, QPI etc.
I've used both generations for ESX and even though I haven't ran any benchmarks between them, all the performance numbers published already seems to be easily reproduced.
Further reading:
Generation comparison and FT: http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2009/09/comparing-performance-of-1vcpu-nehalem-vm-with-2vcpu-har...
VMmark numbers on different x86 platforms: http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results.html