Since the inception of virtualization technology, VMware has delivered innovative solutions to customers on the path to digital transformation. These solutions, combined with VMware’s collaborations with Intel, are transforming security across software and hardware to connect and better secure applications and data wherever they reside – from data center to cloud to the intelligent edge. By optimizing for Intel’s architecture, VMware delivers advanced innovation, hardware-enhanced security, and lower operational costs to customers.
Recently, VMware conducted a performance test with VMware Carbon Black Cloud to compare the experience of CPU-intensive applications hosted on different Amazon EC2 instance types. The results conclusively showed that 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors with built-in AI accelerators delivered performance boosts in event processing time ranging from 20-35% compared to previous generation based M5 instance types. Reducing the event processing time provides significant savings of up to 35% cost reduction for VMware Carbon Black Cloud.1
The Power of Partnership
“Our testing showcased how the VMware Carbon Black Cloud application benefits from the Intel architecture with optimized performance and reduced cloud costs,” said Scott Lundgren, Chief Technology Officer of VMware’s Security Business Unit. “We realized up to a 35% performance boost, in turn enabling up to a 35% reduction in instance counts and commensurate cost savings. Big performance increases while decreasing cost is very powerful.”
“As a broadly deployed processor architecture within Amazon EC2, Intel Xeon Scalable processors help to unlock new performance levels and run business-critical applications,” said Bob Ghaffari, vice president and general manager of the Enterprise and Cloud Networking Division at Intel. “As companies migrate to the cloud, Intel technology powers a diverse range of expanding cloud workloads, including networking and hardware-enhanced security, and Intel continues to collaborate with partners like VMware to usher in the multi-cloud era.”
Methodology
VMware Carbon Black Cloud leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances to run its Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) clusters. In January 2022, VMware Carbon Black Cloud compared two EC2 instance types: AWS M5 instances powered by Intel Xeon Platinum 8175M processors and the newer M6i instances powered by 3rd gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors. To conduct this analysis, VMware created an isolated EKS cluster for the performance to run in and deployed the event processing service. During the testing period, VMware scaled the event processing service and progressively increased the number of events to fully load the system. The team then monitored the system and application metrics while running a cluster on the new M6i instance type over 1 hour time blocks to record average and max CPU values as well as event processing timing.
Source
- VMware Internal Analysis, February 2022
