VMware Infrastructure Sets World Record for Web Server Performance

VMware, Inc. announced that it has set a world record in web server performance on a 16 core server with results submitted for Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) ® consortium's SPECweb2005, a benchmark for evaluating the performance of World Wide Web Servers. The SPECweb2005 workload benchmark gives web users the most objective and representative benchmark for measuring a system's ability to act as a web server and is used by all major vendors as a basis for comparing platform capabilities and ability to support web traffic. When using the highly network-intensive SPECweb2005 workload to compare performance of VMware Infrastructure 3 to that of a similarly configured native - i.e., unvirtualized - server, the results on VMware's virtualization platform in some cases exceeded any number recorded on any physical machine. VMware's aggregate SPECweb2005 performance of 44,000 is higher than any 16-core system has ever recorded.

A SPECweb score is produced by applying a geometric mean to the measured number of simultaneous web server connections on three separate workloads.  On one of these, the E-Commerce workload, VMware's submission supported 69,525 simultaneous connections.  To put this number in perspective, an online retailer might expect no more than 1 percent of its customers to connect to its web servers at one time.  Using the configuration reported by VMware, this online retailer could support nearly seven million customers from a single physical server.  These results further demonstrate the ability of virtualized environments to run applications with performance that is equal to or better than native systems.