HP takes the top spot on VMware VMmark scores for 16- and 32-cores

On the heels of HP’s recent strong earnings announcement, the company’s Enterprise Servers and Storage (ESS) business was happy to report that it captured what it describes as yet another important milestone: achieving the top VMmark scores published on the VMware VMmark site for 16- and 32-core x86 servers.

It was just over a year ago that VMware introduced its virtualization performance benchmarking tool, VMmark. According to VMware, traditional benchmarks were developed to measure the performance associated with running a single workload on a server. These benchmarks do not capture system behavior of multiple virtual machines or the ability of a server to support multiple simultaneous workloads on the same server. VMmark is the first benchmarking system that measures the scalability of heterogeneous virtualized workloads and provides a consistent methodology so benchmark results can be compared across different virtualization platforms. As a result, companies can use this information to make appropriate hardware choices and compare the performance and scalability of different virtualization platforms.

HP said that its HP ProLiant DL785 G5 server achieved the x86 industry’s No. 1 virtualization performance result on the VMmark benchmark. The DL785, an 8-socket server, achieved a score of 21.88@16 tiles or 96 virtual machines. HP said this is “the highest virtualization performance and largest number of virtual machines on an x86 server to-date.” To be fair, it looks as though HP is the only server company to post a 32-core score to the VMmark site.

The HP ProLiant DL585 G5 also currently holds the top result for 4-socket servers, achieved back on Aug. 5 of this year. It achieved a score of 14.74@10 tiles, beating out Dell’s PowerEdge R90x series.

Dell on the other hand currently dominates the 4- and 8-core VMmark scores with its 2-socket PowerEdge series competing against scores from Sun Microsystems.

When asked what was so interesting with capturing the top VMware VMmark scores for these larger machines, HP said it signals to the industry and to customers that ProLiant is the right choice for virtualization. And they stated, “We have a full portfolio of hardware, software and solutions to help customers realize the benefits of a virtualized datacenter which will help improve server utilization while lowering costs.”

When asked to what they attribute these successful scores when compared to their competition, HP said:

“We’re building servers with customer needs in mind. The servers were architected to provide the memory, I/O and storage that running multiple virtual machines require so customers can meet the performance and reliability standards they demand. And from a broader virtualization standpoint, we’ve made significant advancements in our capabilities — taking the guesswork out of planning/provisioning your physical and virtual resources. Customers need a better view of opportunities to increase server utilization and improve application performance by shifting workloads to servers with free capacity.”

“HP takes capacity planning to new levels with its new Insight Dynamics-VSE offering which allows customers to automatically analyze and optimize server capacity and power use. By gathering thousands of data points from physical and virtual resources, data is gathered every 5 minutes to create a clear record of server utilization – memory, processor, I/O and energy consumption. Then, using HP Smart Solver, the software identifies the best fit for workloads and highlights ops to consolidate servers to improve utilization and cut power consumption. When you need to deploy a new workload, the built in 5 star rating system lets customers instantly see the best place to put the workload in their existing infrastructure. Like having a team of PhDs behind you, HP ID-VSE takes the tedious research and guesswork out of traditional capacity planning.”

You can view the current VMmark test scores on VMware’s Web site.