SPECweb2005 Performance: ESX Server 3.5

VMware ESX Server 3.5 is designed for high performance. With a number of optimizations for superior performance, even the most I/O‐intensive applications perform well when deployed on VMware Infrastructure 3. In this paper we compare the performance of a virtual machine to that of a similarly configured native machine using the industry standard SPECweb2005 workload. In our virtualized tests we achieved close to 85 percent of native throughput performance using the highly network‐intensive SPECweb2005 workload. In the tests focused on measuring latency, we did not observe any noticeable difference in application latency between the native and virtual environments. These results demonstrate that users need not sacrifice performance in order to embrace the benefits of virtualization technology.