HP recently published an impressive SAP three-tier Sales and Distribution (SD) benchmark result that was running entirely on vSphere 5. A total of 32,125 SAP SD benchmark users and 170,320 SAPS was achieved using an HP VirtualSystem Solution that was hosting 22 application server VMs and one database server VM. A "Monster VM" with 20 vCPUs was configured for the Database server VM, which was a key component in enabling the new record setting results.
The configuration used to run the SAP three-tier benchmark is impressive and is an indication of how vSphere is capable of running large enterprise workloads. HP's SAP three-tier SD benchmark result used 11 servers with a total of 132 cores and 264 logical threads with HT enabled. The high number of users and large number of systems in this benchmark are representative of a large SAP landscape, which can all be run on vSphere 5.
The HP SAP three-Tier SD benchmark (certification #2011044) was run on Windows Server 2008 R2 with SQL Server 2008 for the database and SAP ERP 6.0 with EHP 4. The servers were HP ProLiant BL460c G7 model with Intel X5675 processors (2P/12C/24T) and 96GB of RAM. More details are available in a performance brief that HP has published and also on the SAP benchmark site (http://www.sap.com/benchmark).