The HP benchmarking showed that with the right configuration of CPU cores, a virtualized environment exceeded the performance of physical environment in 2 cores and 4 cores configurations by about 4-percent and 6-percent respectively. DayTrader, which is part of Apache Geronimo, the open-source Java Enterprise Edition (EE) 6 application server, is a benchmark application that simulates an online stock trading system. In 2009, HP ran some benchmarks in which vSphere virtualization proved faster than native hardware (PDF Link) on the DayTrader performance benchmark with WebSphere.
In one recent study, which will be described in detail at VMWorld in San Francisco in late August, Edmond DeMattia, Senior Virtualization Architect at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, will show how a vSphere implementation delivered better results than running on native hardware.ĭeMattia found, while running large-scale, Monte-Carlo simulations, that the resources of independent Linux and Windows HPC grids when bound together into a 2,720-core, fully virtualized, HPC platform decreased run-times by an order of magnitude and in one specific use case realized a 2.2-percent performance increase over its native hardware configuration. Believe it or not, with the right tuning, architecture, and workloads, some jobs will run faster VMware vSphere virtualization than native systems. Recent studies have shown that, in some configurations, VMware's vSphere can actually deliver faster performance than native computing. It's a computing truism that when it comes to delivering the fastest possible speeds with high-performance computing (HPC), you must use native computing instead of virtualization.