VMware VROOM! Blog

The majority of business-critical applications such as Web applications, database servers, and enterprise messaging systems have been successfully virtualized, proving the benefits of virtualization for reducing cost and streamlining IT management. However, the adoption of virtualization in the area of latency-sensitive applications has been slow partly due to unsubstantiated performance concerns. By taking VoIP service as an example, a newly published white paper demonstrates that vSphere 5 brings the same virtualization benefits to latency-sensitive applications. In particular, the paper shows that vSphere 5 delivers excellent out-of-the-box performance in terms of voice quality when running VoIP service.

The evaluation results demonstrate that good voice quality is maintained when the number of users (number of voice streams) and media server instance increased, while fully utilizing CPU.  For example, vSphere 5 is able to maintain great VoIP performance even when running 12 instances of VoIP media server configured with a total of 48 vCPUs on a system with 8 cores. It is further shown that the NetIOC feature is able to prevent packet loss successfully, thereby helping to preserve voice quality under severe contention for network.

Read more about the VoIP Performance Evaluation on VMware vSphere 5.