Today at EMC World 2009, VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, announced record storage performance for VMware vSphere 4, the industry's first operating system for building the internal cloud. VMware vSphere 4 has achieved 364,000 input output operations per second (IOPS) in maximum storage throughput far exceeding the needs of even the most demanding enterprise applications. VMware vSphere 4 outperforms any virtualization solution on the market, nearly quadrupling its previous record. These performance results demonstrate why customers are deploying VMware virtualization across their datacenters, moving toward 100 percent virtualization.

According to data collected with VMware Capacity Planner, most demanding databases usually require a few thousand IOPS in storage performance. For example, an Oracle database averages 1,280 IOPS for a 4-way Oracle virtual machine. VMware vSphere 4 exceeds this requirement from a single server -- and can power up to:

--  700,000 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes
--  273 4-way Oracle databases
--  10x more storage throughput than all of Wikipedia
    

"With such high records of storage throughput, VMware continues its track record for industry-leading performance," said Dr. Stephen Herrod, chief technology officer of VMware. "VMware vSphere performance enhancements enable virtualization of the most I/O-intensive applications in the world, helping customers justify moving to 100 percent virtualization across their companies."

VMware vSphere 4 has an enterprise-class storage architecture for virtualization; it incorporates a number of new high performance features to help achieve this record I/O throughput. It includes a new paravirtualized virtual machine storage device called pvscsi, a new core-offload I/O system to utilize processors on multi-core systems, processor scheduler enhancements to improve the efficiency of interrupt delivery and associated processing, and advanced I/O concurrency updates, all of which significantly optimize storage throughput for high-transaction-rate workloads. VMware vSphere 4 also introduces new scalability capabilities. By expanding server resource support to 1 TB of RAM and 64 logical processing cores, some of the very largest and most powerful servers can be leveraged for virtual workloads. With support for up to 256 GB of RAM and eight virtual CPUs per virtual machine, nearly 100 percent of resource-intensive workloads such as high-end databases are suitable for virtualization.

VMware recorded the new VMware vSphere 4 storage performance benchmark at the EMC Partner Engineering Lab in Santa Clara, California. The test setup included a single VMware vSphere 4 server generating I/O load on 30 enterprise flash drives (EFDs) spread across three EMC CLARiiON CX4 networked storage systems in RAID 1/0 configuration. The Iometer tool was used to generate 8K I/O size, 100 percent Random 100 percent Read I/O workload against the test disks in each of the three virtual machines used in these tests.

"The greater scalability limits and better consolidation ratios with VMware vSphere 4 enable customers to run many more virtual machines on a single server, and yet support the storage throughput needs for all those virtual machines," said EMC's Chad Sakac, Vice President, VMware Technical Alliance. "The tests, performed using EMC CLARiiON CX4 networked storage systems with 30 enterprise flash drives delivered performance comparable with 2000 FC drives with 85% lower acquisition cost, and 95% less power, cooling and space. These results and cost savings will illustrate that VMware vSphere can more than meet the performance needs of any mission-critical, resource-intensive application, while providing additional benefits such as higher availability."

VMware vSphere 4 is expected to be generally available during the second quarter of 2009.

For more information on these performance tests, visit http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/ and click on the article titled, "350,000 I/O operations per Second, One vSphere Host." For more information on the performance enhancements of VMware vSphere 4, visit http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vsphere_performance_wp.pdf.