VMware

Upgrade to the Best Platform for Business-Critical Applications

Accelerate your application lifecycle and maximize end-user Quality of Service by running your applications on VMware Infrastructure. Test, stage, and provision your multi-tier applications quickly and efficiently to accelerate the application lifecycle. Automatically provide your applications with the right levels of scalability and availability to ensure end-user QoS. Virtualize large databases such as SQL Server, email applications such as Exchange, and enterprise application suites such as SAP and Oracle with breakthrough performance—all with the full support of hundreds of ISVs, including Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and IBM.

" I am extremely happy with the overall performance of BES, Exchange and SAP running on ESX. Some people question whether those applications can run in a virtualized environment. I’m here to say that they absolutely can, because we’re doing it right now. Those and other mission-critical applications run extremely smoothly on ESX and we have no performance issues at all. "

— Bill Moore, IT Infrastructure Manager, Nuvasive Inc.

Achieve Breakthrough Performance

In the past, you may have been hesitant to run large, demanding applications on VMware Infrastructure due to perceived performance constraints. Today, with the latest advancements in VMware ESX and underlying hardware platforms, more than 95% of applications running on VMware ESX can match or even exceed the performance they would achieve on physical servers.

Scale Individual Virtual Machines to Match Physical Performance

Virtual machines today can support the most demanding workloads with the following performance capabilities:

  • 4 Virtual CPUs and 64 GB of memory per VM
  • Performance overhead limited to less than 10% to 20%
  • ESX support for 100,000 IOPS
  • 9 Gbps ESX network bandwidth

At these levels of performance, more than 95% of the 700,000 applications that we have measured in our customer base would deliver comparable levels of performance running in a virtual machine as on physical servers, including the majority of large 4-CPU databases.

More information on VMware performance, including benchmarks and best practices, can be found in our performance pages and the VROOM! blog .

Scale Out More Efficiently on Large Multicore Servers

Hardware is continuing to evolve down the path of packing an ever-increasing number of processor cores per chip. Unfortunately very few applications are sufficiently multi-threaded to truly scale up to the full capacity of these servers. Scale out these applications more efficiently with VMware, by enabling multiple instances to share a single server and leverage its full capacity while better utilizing memory and preserving isolation between instances.

Achieve 100% increase in Exchange infrastructure throughput. For example, the Exchange 2007 Mailbox Server running on physical servers can only scale to about 8 processor cores and support about 8,000 heavy mailbox users, whether running on an 8-core or 16-core server. With VMware, Exchange Mailbox Servers can be scaled out to achieve record server throughput of 16,000 heavy mailbox users by leveraging the full capacity of a 16-core server. This throughput is achieved by scaling Exchange out on 8 Virtual Machines, each supporting 2,000 heavy mailbox users.

"In order to ensure we could get top performance out of our hardware to keep costs down, we needed to be able to run our servers at high utilization rates. With VMotion, I can move an instance of SAP from one server to another, and the end user won’t even see a Blip. This means that we can run our servers at higher efficiencies without increasing the risk of downtime, and provide more robust SLAs that compare well to traditional hosting—but at a 30-percent discount."

— Uwe Wagner, Sales Director, Western Region, T-Systems North America

Next Steps

Read up on our growing ISV ecosystem and ISV support.