I am fascinated studying the ripple effects seen in overall system performance caused by tuning a subset of workloads in a virtualized environment. Our partners at Sun have provided a textbook case by publishing two VMmark 1.1 results on the Sun Fire X4240 last month. The scores were 7.92 @ 6 tiles and 8.07 @ 6 tiles, roughly a 2% difference. The higher result was run using large pages for the javaserver workload while the lower result did not have large pages enabled. (Look here for instructions on how to allow large page usage on Windows 2003.) Using large pages allows the six VMmark javaserver workloads in the benchmark test to consume significantly fewer CPU resources while achieving their desired performance. This CPU savings frees additional resources to be shared by the other thirty workloads, resulting in a higher overall score. Thanks to our partners at Sun for sharing the data.