We all count on Moore’s Law to make our lives easier every time we upgrade to the next generation of computing systems, but we sometimes forget that there’s a lot of hard work that goes into improving the performance of our hardware and software.

I’m John Troyer from VMware’s VMTN Blog. For AMD’s Virtualization Ecosystem Month, I thought I’d talk about the recent performance testing we’ve seen with the 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processor (codenamed “Shanghai”) and how VMware Virtual Infrastructure can unleash your applications to take full advantage of your new hardware.

First of all, these processors are fast. Here is some background on VMmark from our VROOM! Blog:

VMmark is a benchmark intended to measure the performance of virtualization environments in an effort to allow customers to compare platforms. It is also useful in studying the effect of architectural features. VMmark consists of six workloads (Web, File, Database, Java, Mail and Standby servers). Multiple sets of workloads (tiles) can be added to scale the benchmark load to match the underlying hardware resources. For more information on VMmark see here.

Now take a look at the VMmark Results page: a screen shot of the three current top scoring entries is shown on the right. The Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor Model 8384 is powering all of those top-scoring entries.

One of the reasons these Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors are so fast is that they contain AMD’s Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) technology, which gives hardware support for MMU virtualization. We wrote a white paper showing how VMware ESX takes advantage of RVI, including a 29% increase in performance with Citrix XenApp; and in a recent study on our VROOM! blog, we showed RVI boosting VMmark performance boost by as much as 17%.

These processors are fast, but can your application take advantage of them? Many applications can’t utilize all the cores of modern CPUs. We tested the ability of the Apache web server to scale up and use more CPU cores using the web performance benchmark SPECweb®2005. Even using 8 processors, .However, if you scale out with VMware Virtual Infrastructure using multiple virtual machines, all running a web server, you can scale to take advantage of all 8 cores.Apache on a native, non-virtualization system only delivered 1.85x the performance of a single processor

We decided to show this by creating a rocket car and setting a land speed record. We documented how we built our web serving rocket car on an HP ProLiant DL585 G5 with four Quad-Core AMD Opteron Model 8382 processors. This setup achieved the highest SPEC®web2005 result ever on a 16-core system. Now, there are cheaper ways to move this many transactions on a virtual platform, but we weren’t building a cargo-hauling truck, we were building a race car to prove a point – scaling out with virtual machine building blocks is the best way to overcome multi-core scaling limitations of current applications.

Check out the eye-opening graphs in Scott Drummond’s blog post showing how your application running in a native environment probably will (or won’t) scale over the next few years and how a virtual building block architecture can help you take advantage of the newest generation of processors. VMware will continue to work together with AMD to help unleash the power of your high performance applications with virtualization.

John Troyer manages VMware’s blogging and social media programs.His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Any claims made herein have not been independently verified by AMD. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

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