Consolidating Web Applications Using VMware Infrastructure

Enterprises continue to move their technologies and services onto the Web. Today, the Web servers that provide these services are distributed across multiple systems. As the number of Web applications increases, it is very common for the number of physical systems in the data center hosting these Web applications to increase along with them. Studies from IDC, among others, describe the challenges IT managers face administering the proliferation of servers used to run Web applications. Virtualization can help businesses to consolidate their Web computing needs onto fewer high‐performance servers. This approach can simplify management, save operating costs, and increase the efficiency of delivering Web services. In this paper we explore the configuration and testing of VMware® Infrastructure 3 as a consolidation platform for multiple Apache Web servers. It describes the processes and methodologies we used in the consolidation study. In addition, we describe the results of our performance testing using the industry standard SPECweb2005 workload to determine the effectiveness of this consolidation approach. This paper covers the following topics: “Technologies Used” on page 1 “Consolidation Using VMware Infrastructure 3” on page 2 “System Tuning” on page 5 “Performance and Scalability” on page 7 “Conclusions” on page 10 “References” on page 10 “Appendix: Detailed SPECweb2005 Results” on page 11