I recently wrote a blog article detailing Hyper-Threading (HT) and its effect on vSphere. An astute reader pointed out, a recent update to Project VRC’s terminal services analysis suggests disappointment with HT on vSphere. We spent a lot of time looking at those results to understand why they contradicted the body of performance data, which show HT offering 10-30% gain on vSphere. What we discovered led us to create a vSphere patch that would allow users to improve performance in some benchmarking environments.
March 17, 2010
September 21, 2009
vSphere Performance Leadership with Terminal Services
Project VRC’s latest update (document available with registration) to their ongoing analysis of Terminal Services and XenApp performance in virtualized environments supports VMware’s claims of industry-leading performance. There are two main conclusions of the revised version: (1) VMware outperforms XenServer and (2) previous performance measurements of XenServer were in error, reporting artificially high results on that product.
September 16, 2009
SQL Server Performance Problems Not Due to VMware
[First re-post of an old favorite. This document is my most popular blog entry from the communities.]
Microsoft SQL Server runs at better than 80% of native on VI3 in most benchmarked environments. In production environments, and under loads that model those conditions, SQL Server runs at 90-95% of native on ESX 3.5. I can say this with confidence despite a large amount of the industry’s skepticism because I’ve spent so much time on SQL Server in the past half year. I’d like to share some of my research on the subject and observations with you.
