VROOM!

VMware recently released a whitepaper Virtualizing Performance-Critical Database Applications in VMware® vSphere™ that shows why vSphere 4 is an excellent platform for performance-critical database applications.  The paper details performance experiments using an OLTP workload against an Oracle database. Results show that even at very high loads, benchmark thoughput is  85% of native on vSphere 4. The table below summarizes statistics which give an indication of the load placed on the system in the native and virtual machine configurations.

Table 1. Comparison of Native and Virtual Machine Benchmark Load Profiles.

Scale-up ratios show that every doubling of vCPUs results in a 90% increase in throughput. 

Figure 1. vSphere 4 vs. Native – throughput normalized to 2vCPU, ESX 4.0.

  These results are the outcome of numerous performance enhancements in vSphere 4. These include added hardware support for memory virtualization, more efficient and feature-rich storage stack, and significantly better CPU resource management. The net result is a 24-28% increase in throughput over ESX 3.5, for 2- and 4- vCPU VMs, respectively. Additionally, with support for 8-vCPU VMs, maximum throughput achievable from a single VM is much higher in vSphere 4 than in ESX 3.5.

Figure 2. vSphere 4 vs. ESX 3.5 – throughput normalized to 2vCPU, ESX 4.0.

vSphere has the capability to handle loads far larger than that demanded by most Oracle database applications in production. Support for VMs with  8 vCPUs, a near-linear scale-up and a 24% performance boost over ESX 3.5, make vSphere 4 an excellent platform for virtualizing very high end Oracle databases.

For details regarding experiments and the performance enhancements in vSphere, please read the paper at:  Virtualizing Performance-Critical Database Applications in VMware® vSphere™.