One of the claims to fame of VMware's virtualization products have been their ability to perform very well over the last few years - creating a benchmark, in my mind, for others to reach and achieve with their own platforms. Performance has been and continues to be one of those hot topics covered in the virtualization space. People are always trying to squeeze out every bit of performance that they can in their One of the claims to fame of VMware’s virtualization products have been their ability to perform very well over the last few years – creating a benchmark, in my mind, for others to reach and achieve with their own platforms.Performance has been and continues to be one of those hot topics covered in the virtualization space. People are always trying to squeeze out every bit of performance that they can in their environment, and rightly so. And along side of trying to architecturally and programmatically improve the performance of their product, VMware has also created a performance group called VROOM! that takes a deeper look at various performance issues on the company’s blog site. VROOM! team members recently added two new performance papers online.SPECweb2005 Performance on ESX Server 3.5Virtualization is revolutionizing data center computing by making it easy for people to run multiple operating systems and multiple applications seamlessly on the same computer. More and more organizations are adopting VMware Infrastructure 3 for server consolidation and to reduce the total cost of ownership. VMware ESX Server 3.5 is designed for high performance. With a number of optimizations for superior performance, even the most I/O‐intensive applications perform well when deployed on VMware Infrastructure 3. In this paper we compare the performance of a virtual machine to that of a similarly configured native machine using the industry standard SPECweb2005 workload. In our virtualized tests we achieved close to 85 percent of native throughput performance using the highly network‐intensive SPECweb2005 workload. In the tests focused on measuring latency, we did not observe any noticeable difference in application latency between the native and virtual environments. These results demonstrate that users need not sacrifice performance in order to embrace the benefits of virtualization technology.Performance of VMware VMI VMware ESX Server 3.5 introduces support for guest operating systems that use VMware’s paravirtualization standard, Virtual Machine Interface (VMI). This paper describes VMI and its performance benefits, concluding that VMI-style paravirtualization offers performance improvements for a wide variety of workloads, but that the actual performance gains depend on the nature of those workloads. Software Development