ESX Server Performance and Resource Management for CPU-Intensive Workloads

VMware® ESX Server® 2 provides a robust, scalable virtualization framework for consolidating multiple systems onto a single hardware platform. By default, machine resources are shared equally among the multiple virtual systems. In addition customers can tailor virtual machine configurations to allocate CPU and system resources based on various environmental, application, and workload factors. This white paper describes the methods available for allocating and managing resources among ESX Server virtual machines. The paper then examines benchmark results run with the system configurations to illustrate the effects and benefits of using these different scaling and resource allocation methods. The benchmark tests used to measure virtual machine performance are based on a subset of a standard well-known benchmark test suite available from SPEC® (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation). This white paper covers the following topics: • Introduction • Virtual Machine Scalability • Virtual Versus Native Scaling • Limiting CPU Resources via Maximums • Guaranteeing CPU Resources via Minimums • Allocating CPU Resources via Shares • Setting CPU Affinity • Page Sharing • Conclusions This white paper is intended for partners, resellers, and system administrators who are beginning to deploy VMware products and need to understand the implications that various virtual machine scaling and configuration options have on performance and throughput. The benchmark examples and accompanying descriptions and analyses should help both administrators and users understand the impact of virtualization on system and application performance.