The impact of virtualisation

My colleague Jan searched a little bit in the large heap of benchmarking certifications of SAP and found something really interesting. The benchmarks certified in document number 2009034 (Sun Fire X4270, 2 processors /8 cores / 16 threads, Intel Xeon Processor X5570, 2.93 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache and 256 KB L2 cache per core, 8 MB L3 cache per processor, 48 GB main memory) yielded 15,320 SAPS on 8 vCPU. On the other side an Fujitsu PRIMERGY Model RX300 S5 (2 processors / 8 cores / 16 threads, Intel Xeon Processor X5570, 2.93 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache and 256 KB L2 cache per core, 8 MB L3 cache per processor, 96 GB main memory) yielded 11,230 SAPS (as certified by 2009029). I should add something … in my opinion it’s not the system, that was responsible for this large gap. So what’s the difference? Both benchmarks included an virtualisation layer. Both systems were limited to use 8 vCPU for the central server. And here is the difference: The Sun system used Containers on Solaris 10 with Oracle 10g and started the central server in a non-global zone. The Fujitsu system used SLES 10 with MaxDB as a VMware ESX 4.0 VM. Based on this benchmark, it looks like that the containerized system is able to yield 136 percent of the performance of the VMware-virtualized system. 35 percent performance are a quite significant difference.