In the recent study from Principled Technologies VMware vSphere 5 competes against Microsoft Hyper-V R2 SP1
What's the efficiency and performance under a pressure? When you overcomit the memory of your host (when you allocate more memory to your VMs than your physical host actually have), the different hypervisors can behave differently, can perform differently and the performance it's like in the F1 course……. the better wins….
So In this side-by-side test conducted by Principal Technologies, which is an independant company which did the job of comparing VMware vSphere 5 and Microsoft Hyper-V R2 SP1 (with new dynamic memory in this release). And the test showed that when running workloads with 30 VMs per physical host, vSphere takes the advantage by outperforming Microsoft's Hyper-V by 18.9.
One might say…, it's ok if my server is not enough efficient and performs like that, but imagine that you have more hosts in your cluster…? That's where performance matters. And vSphere takes clearly advantage of the Four Memory Optimization techniques:
– Transparent page sharing
– Memory Ballooning
– Memory Compression
– Hypervisor swap
In addition, in the vSphere 5, even the Hypervisor swap was enhanced by new feature called swap to host cache. See the definition of the new feature here.
The test platform was a server with 12 physical cores with HT activated CPU and 96 Gigs of RAM. The VMs were configured each with 2 vCPU and 4 Gigs of RAM running Windows Server 2008R2 sp1 with SQL 2008R2 SP1 and database workload was created with the DVD Store Version 2 (DS2) benchmark tool which simulates an online store with results using as a Orders per minute (OPM) as results.
With a quick quote from Virtual Reality blog from VMware one can imagine the years of developement …..
We knew from our history with ESX, ESXi and vSphere that getting good, predictable performance when VM density gets high and host memory is overcommitted requires more than just ballooning. We’ve built an array of technologies into vSphere that have been optimized for over a decade to make it a platform our customers feel comfortable with when pushing resources to the limit.
Feel free to download and read by yourself the full report or summary and see why VMware vSphere is the best cloud infrastructure platform.
What's interesting is the Figure 4 chart, which brings the change in the total performance of the system. While ESXi 5 brought an increase of 11.2% overall performance, the Hyper-V system declined with -3.3%.
You can see it on this image below:
The conclusion of the test:
vSphere scaled better when going from 25 to 30 VMs.
The total OPM performance was superior by 18.9%.
You can read full report or summary here.
Source: Virtual Reality
