Comparing Microsoft Hyper-V Performance on Dell PowerEdge and HP ProLiant Servers

The combination of powerful multi-core processors and virtualization has enabled significant increases in data center efficiency, supporting server consolidation and increased hardware utilization while still maintaining high performance. To evaluate new six-core Intel^®  Xeon^®  processors in virtualized environments, in September 2008 the Dell Enterprise Technology Center (Dell TechCenter) team ran tests comparing performance and power consumption on three server configurations running the Microsoft^®  Windows Server^®  2008 Hyper-V^TM virtualization platform at 80 percent processor utilization: a Dell^TM  PowerEdge^TM R900 server with six-core Intel Xeon processors, the same server with quad-core Intel Xeon processors, and an HP ProLiant DL585 G2 server with quad-core AMD Opteron^TM  processors.

Virtualized server performance can be measured in two components: sizing or capacity, which indicates the number of VMs that a server can support, and the aggregate performance that those VMs can achieve. In addition to performance, however, organizations should also consider power consumption when evaluating a server. Power consumption depends on multiple factors, including amount of RAM, number of PCI adapters, number of internal disks, and load level.

In the Dell TechCenter tests, the Dell PowerEdge R900 with six-core Intel Xeon processors offered up to a 27 percent performance advantage over the HP ProLiant DL585 G2 with quad-core AMD Opteron processors and up to a 6 percent advantage in performance per watt. In addition, simply upgrading to six-core processors in the PowerEdge R900 increased its performance by approximately 18 percent while decreasing power consumption by approximately 11 percent—providing up to a 32 percent increase in performance per watt. These results can provide an idea of the potential performance and efficiency advantages these six-core processors can offer in Hyper-V virtualized environments.

By The Dell TechCenter Team

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