Independent technology assessment firm, Principled Technologies, recently conducted a comprehensive performance comparison between VMware vSphere 5 and Hyper-V R2 SP1. In a head-to-head competition, VMware ESXi once again smoked the Windows-based hypervisor in three amazing ways:
- VMware vSphere 5 delivered 18.9% higher aggregate performance than Hyper-V
- Performance among individual VMs was much more consistent with VMware than with Microsoft
- Overall VMware ESXi performance actually improved with higher density, while Hyper-V declined with just 25% oversubscription
A chart tells the story very nicely:
Let’s take a closer look at these three victories.
Higher Performance
Using virtual machines running the latest Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 and SQL Server 2008 R2, VMware ESXi 5 churned out 18.9% more orders per minute with the DVD Store 2 benchmark, proving once again that superior vSphere technology enables more work to be done on less physical equipment. Higher density virtualization translates into fewer servers, network ports, power, space, cooling, and software licenses — reducing costs for your cloud infrastructure.
Fairer Resource Management
With the shift to cloud-based, multi-tenant computing environments, it’s more important than ever to be able to guarantee resources to infrastructure consumers. The advanced resource management capabilities of VMware ESXi continue to shine — delivering 39.2% better standard deviation among virtual machines. The erratic performance of Hyper-V workloads translates into an inconsistent experience and missed SLAs in densely-virtualized environments.
Better Scalability
Thanks in part to the full range of advanced memory management technologies in vSphere, VMware ESXi performance actually increased by 11.2% when more VMs were added to a host. Hyper-V, with apparently sub-optimal scheduling capabilities — and lack of memory page sharing, compression, and hypervisor swap — did not fare as well; performance dropped by 3.3% in a very reasonable oversubscription scenario.
VMware vSphere: The best cloud infrastructure platform
While Microsoft claims that Dynamic Memory, introduced recently in Service Pack 1, has closed the gap between Hyper-V and vSphere, these independent test results tell a very different story. Although that new feature does allow Hyper-V to power on more VMs than before, infrastructure architects will need to consider the performance impact on workloads in higher-density private clouds built from the unproven and less mature Windows-based hypervisor.
Please download the full report (or summary) and see why VMware vSphere is the best cloud infrastructure platform.
Follow @eric_gray TweetTags: Hyper-V, Industry, memory overcommit, performance, vSphere
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yes this is wonderful for vmware, at least in theory but since I can’t find the build docs I have no idea if its accurate.
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