Official With SAP SD Benchmarks

It is rare to see official traditional benchmarks published on virtualization, but in the case of SAP it is happening.

A couple of weeks ago, HP published an SAP Three-Tier SD benchmark on vSphere 5 and an HP VirtualSystem.  This was a big system made up of 11 physical servers, hosting one "Monster" database VM and 20 application server VMs.  The result was a 2x increase in the number of users vs the previous SAP three-tier benchmark that was published on vSphere 4.1 (which was also an awesome result).

If go back a couple more months, Fujitsu published an SAP two-tier SD benchmark on vSphere 5 that used a single "Monster" VM.  The rules and definition of what a two-tier benchmark limits it to a single VM, which in vSphere 5 can now support up to 32 vCPUs.  The really interesting wrinkle in this publication was that Fujitsu also published a native two-tier SD on the same hardware and software stack.  These two official results showed that virtual performance within 6% of native.

Using the official SAP SD benchmark results the capability and performance of vSphere as a platform for SAP can be considered.  The large three-tier environment clearly shows how much vSphere has grown in terms of capability from the previous version.  The two-tier results show a clear comparison between virtual and native, with the difference being relatively small.

These official benchmarks are strong proof points for running SAP (and other important stuff) on vSphere 5.