Virtualization Benchmarks Performance

New VMmark Results Featuring 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ Processors

We are pleased to announce three new published VMmark results from Dell, HPE, and Lenovo that use the new 3rd Gen AMD EPYC™ Processors, which launched today.

The figure below compares the VMmark performance of the 2nd Gen EPYC processors against the new 3rd Gen EPYC processors.  Both results were run on the same server vendor/model, and both were in “matched pair” 2-host, 2-socket cluster configurations.

vSphere 6.7 U3 and 2nd Gen AMD EPYC Processors vs. vSphere 7.0 U2 and 3rd Gen AMD EPYC Processors

 The key differences include:

  • The AMD EPYC 7H12 processors have been upgraded to the new AMD EPYC 7763 processors
  • The version of VMware vSphere was upgraded from 6.7 Update 3 to the also just-released 7.0 Update 2.  To summarize from the Release Notes, with ESXi 7.0 Update 2, out-of-the-box optimizations can increase AMD EPYC CPU performance by up to 30% in various benchmarks. The updated ESXi scheduler takes full advantage of the AMD EPYC CPU NUMA architecture to make the most appropriate placement decisions for virtual machines and containers. AMD EPYC CPU optimizations allow a higher number of VMs or container deployments with better performance.

As shown above, Lenovo achieved a higher overall score, while being able to run two additional tiles (38 more VMs) and still meeting strict Quality-of-Service (QoS) compliance requirements imposed by the benchmark.

Here are direct links to all of the new results:

VMmark is a free benchmark tool used by hardware vendors and others to measure the performance, scalability, and power consumption of virtualization platforms and has become the standard by which the performance of virtualization platforms is evaluated.  For more information, please visit the VMmark product page.