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!

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