1

Some Context for This Session…

Performance historically a concern for virtualized applications

By 2009, VMware (through vSphere) and hardware vendors nearly eliminated the costs of storage, network, and memory virtualization

With overheads near zero, new technologies in virtual deployments could sometimes beat physical counterparts

This session will focus on a diverse mix of extremelydemanding apps

Applications where we have proven performance with industry standard workloads and benchmarks

• Not just speeds and feeds

2

Paravirtualization

NPIV Support

TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO)

Jumbo Frames

Ubuntu64GB virtual RAM

256 GB of physical RAM

10 GigE

Infiniband

SATA devices

Windows Vista

Catalysts for Change - ESX 3.5 Platform Enhancements

Storage

Network

Virtual Machines

ESX Server

CPUMemory

Large memory pages

Performance Scale Compatibility

3

OS

APP

OS

APP

Storage

Networking

Virtual Machines

CPU

Memory

Hardware Scale Up 64 cores and 1 TB

physical RAM

Hardware Assist Purpose Built Scheduler

Lowest CPU overhead

Hardware Assist Page Sharing Ballooning

Maximum memory efficiency

VMXNET3VMDirectPath I/O

Wirespeed network access

Storage stack optimizationpvscsi

Less than 0.1 ms latency Over 350,000 IOPS

Virtual hardware scale out 8-way vSMP and 255 GB of

RAM per VMVM Scale Up

Current NEW

ESX

OS

APP

OS

APP

OS

APP

Catalysts for Change - ESX 4.0 Platform Enhancements

4

History Lesson on Application Performance

ESX Version

ESX 2 ESX 3

Ap

ps

Su

pp

ort

ed

100% ESX 3.5 ESX 4.0

Overhead

VM CPU

VM Memory

IO

• 30% - 60%

• 1 vCPU

• 3.6 GB

• 20% - 30%

• 2 vCPU

• 800 Mb

• 4 vCPU

• 64 GB

• 100,000 IOPS

• 9 Gb

• <2% - 10%

• 8 vCPU

• 255 GB

• >350,000 IOPS

• 30 Gb

• <10,000 IOPS

• 380 Mb

• 16 GB

• <10% - 20%

Source: VMware Capacity Planner analysis of > 700,000 servers in customer production environments

5

Catalysts for Change - Hardware Improvements

2006

2007

2010

2008

2009

AMD-V released

Intel VT-d released

Intel VT-d 10x fasterIntel EPT released

AMD-V 10x fasterAMD RVI released

Intel 4M L2 cache

AMD 4M L2 cache

Intel FlexPriority Released

6

Catalysts for Change - Software Scalability Limited

1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 20151

10

100

1000

Oracle SQL Server Exchange

Avg. Cust, Application Avg. Four Socket Web ServersYear

Nu

mb

er

of

Co

res

us

ed

Additional application scaling cost-prohibitive at some point

Virtualization provides a means to exploit the

hardware’s increasing parallelism

VMware ESX Scaling:

Keeping up with core counts

vSph

ere

X

vSph

ere

4

7

Catalysts for Change: New Virtualization-based Architectures

vSphere-based deployments have options unavailable to physical servers:

• On-loading multi-threaded IO drivers to efficiently use multiple cores

• Scale out on a single host

• Circumvents application scalability limitations

• Improves memory locality of reference and increases cache efficiency

• Hardware-accelerated network interrupt delivery

• Strict memory encapsulation into NUMA nodes

8

Catalysts for Change - Summary

VMware has made dramatic improvements in the performance of its virtualization platform

Hardware vendors have accelerated the efficiency of virtual workloads

vSphere provides flexibility that can allow administrators to circumvent application limitations

vSphere efficiently uses CPU in a way physical servers cannot

vSphere can meet and beat native application performance in many situations