Epic Week for VROOM!

I know that I'm a bit biased towards the VMware Performance team blog VROOM!, but the amount and quality of posts that went up last week was really great.  If you are looking for something to read over the holidays - you should be sure to include VROOM!.  All of the new posts include new performance results that have not been published anywhere else before AND have full color graphs (and even a few diagrams as well!)

The week started with a set of tests that illustrate how Load-Based Teaming (LBT) performs in ESX 4.1.  This is a new traffic-aware dynamic load-balancing option for teamed NICs that was added with 4.1.

On Tuesday the first performance results with the newly released multi-host VMmark 2.0 benchmark were published. It also includes a great overview of VMmark two with a description of the workload, infrastructure operations, and scoring methodology for the benchmark.

After taking a day off, VROOM! continued a furious pace with perhaps the article of the week on Thursday (which was of course the one that I did!) on the Performance of Oracle RAC on vSphere 4.1.  Performance tests showed that a virtualized Oracle RAC database was within 11 to 13 percent of native.  This used a test that allowed for the comparison of virtual and physical to be as fair as possible.

Just for fun on Friday a post went up that used VMmark 2.0 to do performance testing in a new way.  It looks at the performance of low-cost entry level hosts combined into a vSphere cluster.  Each individual entry-level host would not have been able to run even one tile for VMmark, but combined they can support multiple tiles.

I guarantee that you will learn a few things about vSphere performance that you didn't know before if you have a chance to get some reading between trips to the mall to do stuff like getting to see Santa.

Todd