1 Some Context for This Session…  Performance historically a concern for virtualized applications  By 2009, VMware (through vSphere) and hardware vendors nearly eliminated the costs of storage, network, and memory virtualization  With overheads near zero, new technologies in virtual deployments could sometimes beat physical counterparts  This session will focus on a diverse mix of extremely demanding apps  Applications where we have proven performance with industry standard workloads and benchmarks Not just speeds and feeds

2 Paravirtualization NPIV Support TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO) Jumbo Frames Ubuntu 64GB virtual RAM 256 GB of physical RAM 10 GigE Infiniband SATA devices Windows Vista Catalysts for Change - ESX 3.5 Platform Enhancements Storage Network Virtual Machines ESX Server CPU Memory Large memory pages Performance ScaleCompatibility

3 OS APP OS APP Storage Networking Virtual Machines CPU Memory Hardware Scale Up  64 cores and 1 TB physical RAM Hardware Assist Purpose Built Scheduler  Lowest CPU overhead Hardware Assist Page Sharing Ballooning  Maximum memory efficiency VMXNET3 VMDirectPath I/O  Wirespeed network access Storage stack optimization pvscsi  Less than 0.1 ms latency  Over 350,000 IOPS  Virtual hardware scale out  8-way vSMP and 255 GB of RAM per VM VM Scale Up CurrentNEW ESX OS APP OS APP OS APP Catalysts for Change - ESX 4.0 Platform Enhancements

4 History Lesson on Application Performance ESX Version ESX 2ESX 3 Apps Supported 100% ESX 3.5ESX 4.0 Overhead VM CPU VM Memory IO 30% - 60% 1 vCPU 3.6 GB 20% - 30% 2 vCPU 800 Mb 4 vCPU 64 GB 100,000 IOPS 9 Gb <2% - 10% 8 vCPU 255 GB >350,000 IOPS 30 Gb <10,000 IOPS 380 Mb 16 GB <10% - 20% Source: VMware Capacity Planner analysis of > 700,000 servers in customer production environments

5 Catalysts for Change - Hardware Improvements AMD-V released Intel VT-d released Intel VT-d 10x faster Intel EPT released AMD-V 10x faster AMD RVI released Intel 4M L2 cache AMD 4M L2 cache Intel FlexPriority Released

6 Catalysts for Change - Software Scalability Limited  Additional application scaling cost- prohibitive at some point Virtualization provides a means to exploit the hardware’s increasing parallelism  VMware ESX Scaling:  Keeping up with core counts vSphere X vSphere 4

7 Catalysts for Change: New Virtualization-based Architectures  vSphere-based deployments have options unavailable to physical servers: On-loading multi-threaded IO drivers to efficiently use multiple cores Scale out on a single host Circumvents application scalability limitations Improves memory locality of reference and increases cache efficiency Hardware-accelerated network interrupt delivery Strict memory encapsulation into NUMA nodes

8 Catalysts for Change - Summary  VMware has made dramatic improvements in the performance of its virtualization platform  Hardware vendors have accelerated the efficiency of virtual workloads  vSphere provides flexibility that can allow administrators to circumvent application limitations  vSphere efficiently uses CPU in a way physical servers cannot  vSphere can meet and beat native application performance in many situations