This page is the wiki home for a white paper that compares the price/performance of the Dell™ PowerEdge™ 2950 and HP Proliant DL585 G2 for virtualization. The complete paper with all details is linked, and a summary/highlights of the paper are included directly on this page.

Discussion and questions about the paper can be written in the discussion section at the bottom of this page.

Advantages of Dell PowerEdge 2950 2-Socket Servers over HP Proliant DL 585 G2 4-Socket Servers for Virtualization

White Paper Executive Summary

To illustrate the advantages of using two-socket servers for virtualization over four-socket servers, a test was conducted with VMware® Infrastructure 3 on the Dell PowerEdge 2950 and the HP ProLiant DL585 G2. The results of these tests show that three PowerEdge 2950 two-socket servers can provide up to 44 percent more performance, 57 percent more performance per watt, and a 95 percent average advantage in price/performance than two HP ProLiant DL585 G2 four-socket servers.

White Paper Highlights

All the tables on this page are taken directly from the white paper. Please see the complete paper for full details.

This table from the paper shows the configuration and pricing of the two servers used in the testing:

	HP ProLiant DL585 G2	PowerEdge 2950 servers
Virtualization software	VMware ESX Server 3.0.1	VMware ESX Server 3.0.1
Processor	Four dual-core AMD Opteron 2.8 GHz 8220SE processors with 1 MB L2 caches (per core)	Two quad-core Intel Xeon X5355 processors at 2.66 GHz with 8MB cache (shared)
HyperTransport / Frontside bus	1 GHz	1,333 MHz
Memory	32 GB (16x 667 MHz PC2-5300 DDR2 2GB DIMMs)	16 GB (8x 667 MHz fully buffered 2GB DIMMs)
Internal disks	Two Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) 73 GB, 15,000 rpm drives	Two Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) 146 GB, 15,000 rpm drives
Network interface card (NIC)	Two 10/100/1,000 Mbps internal NICs	Two 10/100/1,000 Mbps internal NICs
Disk controller	Smart Array P400	PERC 5/i
Hardware Cost	$28,088	$13,498
VMware Licensing Cost	$13,914	$7,188
Source	http://www.hp.com 12/18/2006	http://www.dell.com 12/18/2006

This table from the paper shows the performance results of the two servers on three different virtualization workloads:

	HP ProLiant DL585 G2			PowerEdge 2950
Workload	Number of VMs	Performance	Power Consumption (W)	Number of VMs	Performance	Power Consumption (W)
Microsoft SQL Server 2005	36	31,729 OPM	719	32	29,346 OPM	449
SUSE LAMP	46	10,093 OPM	743	44	9,852 OPM	447
NetBench	52	1,028 Mb/sec	735	42	1,001 Mb/sec	444

The next table shows how the performance results and associated costs would scale, and as additional Dell two-socket or HP four-socket servers were added to the server farm:

	2 HP ProLiant DL585 G2s	3 PowerEdge 2950s	Dell Advantage
Total Number of Sockets	8	6
SQL Server 2005	72 VMs / 63,458 OPM	96 VMs / 88,038 OPM	33% / 39%
SUSE LAMP	92 VMs / 20,186 OPM	132 VMs / 29,556 OPM	44% / 46%
NetBench	104 VMs / 2056 Mb/s	126 VMs / 3003 Mb/s	22% / 46%
Averaged Cumulative Power Consumption on SQL/SUSE/ Netbench (W)	1465	1340	9%
Hardware Cost	$56,176	$40,494	39%
ESX Licensing	$27,828	$21,564	29%
Total Cost	$84,004	$62,058	35%

Performance per watt:

	HP ProLiant DL585 G2	PowerEdge 2950	Dell Advantage
SQL Server 2005	44.1 OPM / watt	65.4 OPM / watt	48%
SUSE LAMP	13.6 OPM / watt	22.0 OPM / watt	62%
NetBench	1.4 Mb/s / watt	2.3Mb/s / watt	61%
			57 % Average

Price/Performance:

	2 HP ProLiant DL585 G2s	3 PowerEdge 2950s	Dell Advantage
SQL Server 2005	$1.32 / OPM	$ .70 / OPM	88 %
SUSE LAMP	$4.16 / OPM	$2.09 / OPM	98 %
NetBench	$40.86 / Mb/s	$20.67 / Mb/s	98 %
			95 % Average

Please post comments and questions about this paper just below in the comments section - Thanks.