Our partners at Sun have just published an improved result for the Sun Blade X8440. This latest test was run with VMware ESX Server 3.5 and demonstrates a 5% improvement over their original VMware ESX Server 3.0.2 result using a nearly identical configuration. Both benchmark disclosure reports can be found at the VMmark results page.
This result underlines the fact that well-designed and well-tuned blade platforms can perform competitively with traditional rack-mount servers in an enterprise-level consolidation scenario. It also demonstrates VMware’s continuous focus on improving the performance of virtualized workloads. And finally, it shows the value of having a well-designed virtualization benchmark with which to measure and compare platforms.