What's the impact of virtualization on benchmark results? Well, let's have a look to these two SAP SD 2tier benchmarks:

2009034: Sun Fire x4270, Solaris 10, Solaris Container as Virtualization, 8vCPUs (half the CPUs available in the box), Oracle 10g, EHP4: 2800 SD-User.

2009029: Fujitsu Primergy RX 3000, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, VMWare ESX Server 4.0, 8vCPUs (half the CPUs available in the box), MaxDB 7.8, EHP4: 2056 SD-User.

This leads into two questions:

Do two "half-box" virtual machines one the same box perform better than the full box? Well, obviously no: Due to Intel's Hyper-Threading technology it's complicated to extrapolate from half of a system to a full utilized system. Both benchmarks used 8 virtual CPUs representing 8 of the totally available 16 threads, and not a single CPU. So they will have used 8 cores, but only the first thread of each.

Will the use VMWare mean a significant loss of performance?: Well, obviously yes. Of course, some of the lower performance is caused by the OS. We have already shown in several benchmarks the advantage of Solaris as OS for SAP. But - we speak about a lower performance of 36%, more than one third! So, there is a major impact of the virtualization.

So, congrats to our benchmark team - this is very impressive!

SAP and all SAP logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries.

The 3rd article of the series 'Getting insights with DTrace' is now online in our in our SAPonSun Wiki. This time we are analyzing a 'performance bottleneck on a SAP application server'. Here are the links to all 3 articles:

'Getting insights with DTrace - Part 1: Analyzing Oracle Logwriter w/ buffered vs. direct I/O'
'Getting insights with DTrace - Part 2: OS version checks (uname) - useful when playing around with SAP on OpenSolaris'
'Getting insights with DTrace - Part 3: Analyzing SAP Appserver I/O'

Congrats to our benchmark team! A new World Record with 8 processors on the two-tier SAP ERP 6.0 enhancement pack 4! Once again, Solaris outperformed Windows, this time again using our large 8 socket AMD machine X4600M2 (see certificate 2009022). Delivering 33230 SAPS / 6050 SD benchmark users, Solaris can keep it advantage to Windows: HP certified 30180 SAPS / 5518 SD benchmark (Certificate 2009009) users using a similar machine (okay, they used 3.1 GHz instead of 2.7 GHz, we used more memory).

You just happen to have an OpenSolaris system idling around and are looking for some use cases? Why not install SAP on it?

SAP and Oracle already provide powerful instrumentation to diagnose problems and performance issues. However, DTrace allows unparalleled deepdive into the system. Read the first article from a new SAPonSun series here: 'Getting insights with DTrace - Part 1' Read the second article here: 'Getting insights with DTrace - Part 2'

Summer is allways the right time for cool things. In this summer Sun in Germany provides four very cool webinars about Sun and Solaris (all in german language):

On June 17, Joerg Meiners - one of the active contributors of the SAP on Sun Community - talks about Adaptive Oracle Grid using Solaris Container. You can already find a whitepaper by him about this topic in our SAP on Sun Wiki.

On June 24, Rolf Kersten - one of the most present members of the Systemhelden Community - talks about MySQL Performance on Sun Fire Servers with Intel Xeon 5500 (aka Nehalem).

On July 8, Joerg Moellenkamp - you maybe know his blog c0t0d0s0.org - talks about "Less known Solaris Features". The Less know Solaris Features are also available as a great whitpaper/tutorial on c0t0d0s0.org.

And on August 26, Volker Wetter - another active contributors of the SAP on Sun Community - talks about "10 Reasons to run your application on Solaris". Of course, you can also find his presentation (with a focus on SAP) in our SAP on Sun Wiki.

The webinars will be presented via WebEX, please register for free!

Tired of firing up your VirtualBox VM just because you need a SAPGUI on your Solaris/OpenSolaris Desktop? Read on...

Are you planning to stretch your SAN ? Are you considering a Metro Cluster setup based on a DWDM infrastructure ? Are you worried about the additional latency imposed by large distances with respect to database / app performance ? Then you might find this article interesting.

Here's a short how-to.

Once again Solaris outperforms Windows in a 2-tier SAP SD benchmark. This time on new Intel Nehalem based systems. [Read More]

The White Paper "Upgrade- and Patchmanagement in a virtualized Data Center" is now available. At the moment only in german language.

For details please read "Upgrade- und Patchmanagement in einer virtualisierten Betriebsumgebung"

Customers often ask:" How does SAP on Solaris x64 perform compared to SAP on Linux or Windows ?" This posting provides you with a set of facts that prove: Solaris on Sun HW is way ahead of the game. Convince yourself ![Read More]

SAP MDM 7.1 now available on the Solaris x64 platform[Read More]

There are cases where new features that are very useful on their own can be combined to offer even more advantages. That is definitely true for zones and ZFS in Solaris 10.

You may have read it already on our homepage or on this SAP blog: Using containers/zones and ZFS, it is possible to clone a SAP system within seconds, upgrade the software in the cloned container and test it, and then direct users from the current to the new production system.

For details on that concept, please click here.

How to check the correct resource control settings in a Solaris 10 system[Read More]