A Dell TechCenter blog that explores the leading edge of virtualization technology.

Windows Server Virtualization Preview Performance Testing
12/13/2007 -- Comments

I recently took the Windows Server Virtualization preview (included with Windows Server 2008 release candidate 0) for a test drive. The intent was to get it installed, create some VMs, put them under load, and see what happens. As this is still pre-release it isn't fair to compare the performance in any absolute terms with either physical servers. But I didn think that it would be fine to put it under some stress and see how the new hypervisor handles the load.

The net results are posted on the wiki in the Microsoft Virtualization section. To sum it up shortly - the system handled the stress very well.

As new releases of the virtualization technolgy to be included with W2K8 come out, we will evaluate them and post what results we can. Let me know what types of things you would like to see.

Todd -- Comments




VMotion and VMware HA with Exchange 2007 VMs
11/29/2007 -- Comments

A second whitepaper from the Exchange 2007 on VMware testing that Kong and I presented at VMWorld has been published on the wiki. It covers the performance of 500, 1000, and 2000 user Exchange VMs under load while using VMotion and VMware HA. The complete results are in the paper, but a quick summary is that all VMs performed without error in all the VMotion and VMware HA tests.

At our presentation at VMworld we talked about how we saw some unexplained behavior with the large VM with both VMotion and VMware HA. We found that by lowering the amount of RAM assigned to the VM, so that one GB was available for ESX to use exclusively, that the performance of the large VM with 2000 users was much better.

A landing page for Exchange on VMware has been created on the wiki that has all of the whitepapers and the VMworld presentation.

Todd -- comments





Whitepaper on Exchange 2007 and ESX 3 Performance
11/7/2007 -- Comments

The whitepaper based on the presentation from VMworld has been published in the most recent edition of Dell PowerSolutions magazine. The paper has more details on the results from our testing with Exchange 2007 VMs. It focuses on the performance testing and characterization work that we did. The basic conclusions were that performance was acceptable for the 500, 1000, and 2000 user workloads that we tested. Additionally, in order to optimize performance you should only use the number of virtual processors that are needed.

Check out the full details in the paper and comment here if you have any questions or want to share your own experiences with Exchange in VMs.

Todd -- Comments




VMWorld 2007 - V3i and Exchange 2007

10/24/2007 -- Comments

I recently attended and presented at VMworld 2007 in San Francisco. It was an absolutely awesome conference with lots of great sessions, tons of attendees, and also fun afterhours parties. One of the big announcements of the show came during Diane Greene's keynote on the first full day of the conference where the embedded version of ESX 3 – V3i – was shown running on the unreleased / unannounced Dell r805 server. A slimmed down version of the VMware ESX server hypervisor is booted from an internal flash card. On stage Diane and Mark Jarvis from Dell showed how quick this combination boots and how easy it was to create and run VMs. The entire keynote has been made available on the VMworld website. (The demo starts at about 10:45 and ends at 17:15 )

Look for more information about the r805 soon.

I presented a super session on virtualizing Exchange 2007 with Kong Yang. We had a great audience and almost everybody stayed until the end where we had lots of great questions. Key findings that we presented were that good performance was attainable with Exchange 2007 in VMs at all sizes that we tested (500, 1000, and 2000 users). We also found that performance of Vmotion and VMware HA was better with the 500 and 1000 user VMs than with the 2000 user VMs. The complete presentation is available on the wiki on the VMware and Exchange page.

Since returning from the conference I spent some time trying to understand the performance issues that we found with the large 2000 user VM in the Vmotion and HA tests. It turns out that we were not leaving enough memory available for the ESX host, which resulted in swapping. Kong and I have written a white paper with the details and it will be posted soon.


Todd -- Comments




Welcome!
10/18/2007 -- Comments

This new blog on Dell TechCenter will focus on the leading edge of virtualization for the enterprise. Server virtualization over the past several years has been getting more and more interest. There seems to be new announcements coming out all the time about new products, offerings, technologies, partnerships, and agreements.

There is a lot going on and there are lots of questions. This blog will focus on the technical aspects of virtualization on Dell server and storage products. We are going to provide information about virtualization that comes directly from the Dell labs AND we are inviting the technical community to join us.

Ask questions, provide answers, and get a better understanding of the virtualization landscape.

Todd -- Comments