The first SAP sales and distribution (SD) benchmark on vSphere 5 has been published. It takes advantage of the new larger VM support in vSphere 5 to reach 4,600 SD Users and 25,150 SAPs with a 24-vCPU VM running on a Fujitsu Primergy server. This is the largest SAP 2-tier benchmark on vSphere as of today.
Fujitsu took the extra step of using the same server and test configuration to publish a non-virtualized result. Comparing the two tests shows that virtual is only 6% lower than native. This is a result of the hard work that was put into vSphere 5 to optimize its performance and shows that large 24 vCPU VMs can have performance very close to native.
A more detailed technical paper is being worked on by Fujitsu and VMware and will be released soon.
Some details of the SAP configuration used in the tests – SAP ECC 6.0 with EHP 4 on Fujitsu Primergy RX300 S6 with 2 x Intel Xeon X5690 processors and 96 GB RAM. The OS used was SuSE Enterprise Linux 11 SP1 and MaxDB 7.8 for the database. SAP certificates are 2011027 and 2011028.