In my last blog I talked about some benchmarks.  Today I was in another discussion surrounding benchmarks; this time concerning virtualization. The discussion centered around what you measure that’s actually useful to the people who make decisions on what to buy.

Do you judge performance in terms of the number of virtual machines on a server, or the number of users a virtual machine can support, or the number of transactions a virtual machine can handle?

A 4 Socket server – the Dell R905 running Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor Model 8360 SE – currently holds the top spot on VMware’s VMmark benchmark, a consolidation benchmark that provides the nearest thing to an "industry standard" virtualization benchmark. It is not surprising that an AMD-based server would hold the top spot – AMD has taken a leadership role in driving the maturation of x86-based virtualization since the introduction of AMD64 technology in 2003.

AMD Opteron™ Model 8360SE – 2.5 GHz, 105W, $2149 processor pricing – system is a Dell R905

Intel Xeon   Model X7350 – 2.93 GHz, 130W, $2301 processor pricing – system is an IBM System x3850 M2

Test results and machine configurations have been taken from http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results.html and have not been independently verified by AMD.

As you can see in the chart above, in the 4P space, AMD leads by ~8%. Thanks to our unique CPU architecture, we have created a processor that has 15% lower frequency and 19% lower processor power specification than the competing product. 

The AMD Opteron processor continues to achieve new levels of performance, but does so without a corresponding increase in power consumption.  I believe this is because of AMD’s commitment to understanding our customer’s needs.  In this case, our solution is not only well-suited to virtualization; it is also scalable – both are important to today’s data center.

While we are grateful to VMWare for taking a leadership position in establishing ways to measure virtualization performance, we all need to keep in mind that VMmark looks at one specific use case of virtualization – consolidation. In my opinion, we need to drive as an industry for a more comprehensive portfolio of virtualization benchmarks that represent a wider set of use cases – such as the performance of demanding business applications on virtual machines and the performance and sizing of hosted client environments like virtual desktop and presentation virtualization. I also believe that we, as an industry, need to develop a more comprehensive set of tools to help users better understand how to practically apply this valuable technology.

Pat Moorhead, AMD’s Advanced Marketing Vice President, has also just posted his own take on virtualization benchmark standardization. I encourage you to read it here.

Just as virtualization is changing how data centers run servers, it is having an equally profound effect on how one benchmarks workloads.

Nigel Dessau is senior vice president and chief marketing officer at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links sites and no endorsement is implied.