The good news? VMware's done a good job creating an environment that will let apps run at a high level of performance without much of a penalty caused by generic hardware drivers and a Linux-based VM hosting environment. We were able to operate relatively demanding apps, such as Exchange Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005, with just a 6 percent performance penalty. Both the LoadSim test for Exchange (see "Virtualization Hit: Exchange" in the image gallery) and the SQLIOSim test (see "Virtualization Hit: Virtual Hardware" in the image gallery) for SQL Server have heavy disk read and write components, so our results illustrate that apps that rely on drive performance may not suffer too greatly, provided there isn't contention for disk access among VMs.
The area where we saw substantially slower performance was in our intranet performance test, which used SilkPerformer 2006 to test the performance of IIS. We saw performance drop off 18 percent in hits per second, and 20 percent in kilobits per second (see "Virtualization Hit: Intranet" in the image gallery). Unlike the SQL Server and Exchange tests, here we saw the price paid for moving from a robust system with 2 GB of RAM to a VM with only 512 MB. With less memory, system performance suffered considerably more than with more disk-bound tests.
Adding Resources
We weren't surprised that we could improve performance by adding more memory to the VM used in our intranet application test. Increasing memory from 512 MB to 1 GB improved throughput by 10 percent and reduced the performance drop compared with the baseline system from 20 percent to 12 percent.
The lesson learned: Apps with high memory demands will benefit from allocating as much physical memory as possible to the VM. In our intranet application test, for example, when we compared results of running the test on dedicated hardware with 2 GB of RAM against a VM environment with 1 GB of RAM, we saw performance drop 12 percent. When we reduced the memory in the VM environment to 512 MB, performance dropped 20 percent against the baseline hardware environment.
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