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The Virtualization Tax Is Greatly Exaggerated

vSphere delivers the performance required to run business-critical applications in large-scale environments. vSphere 5 provides 16 times (source Figure 14 in BCA Whitepaper)  the performance of VMware Infrastructure 3 while keeping virtualization overhead at a limited 2 to 5 percent. The fact is that the virtualization overhead or “tax” is often greatly exaggerated and many application owners are managing applications that have already been virtualized by the server and virtualization teams, and the applications owners don’t even know it.

Performance is a major factor in business-critical applications. Virtual machines perform the same as their physical equivalents, as witnessed in production by the app owners. The following set of graphs illustrates this performance across several applications.

Virtualized Oracle databases perform the same as native databases from the application owner’s perspective (source: Virtualizing Performance-Critical Database Applications in VMware vSphere).

In the figure below, Confio, a third-party company unaffiliated with VMware, compared virtual and physical servers in a side-by-side test, finding the performance would be the same to the DBA (Source: A Comparison of Oracle Performance on Physical and VMware Servers, 2012. Written by Confio, www.confio.com.)

In the figure below, Virtualized SQL databases perform the same as native databases from the application owner’s perspective (Source: Performance and Scalability of Microsoft SQL on vSphere.).

In the figure below, Virtualized SAP performs the same as native equivalents from the application owner’s perspective (Source: Virtualized SAP Performance with VMware vSphere 4.).

In the figure below, Virtualized Java performs the same as native equivalents from the application owner’s perspective (Source: Performance of Enterprise Java Applications on VMware vSphere 4.1 and SpringSource tc Server.).

In the figure below, Virtualized Hadoop performs the same as native equivalents from the application owner’s perspective (Source: Source: “A Benchmarking Case Study of Virtualized Hadoop Performance on VMware vSphere® 5”, 2012.)

Learn more: Virtualizing Business Critical Applications Whitepaper [39-page PDF]