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November 23, 2004

Comparing Apples to Oranges?

After some discussion between Devlin and I. I am starting to wonder if it will even be useful to load anything besides the ESX server on the other machine. The question arises on whether installing an OS on there will be useful when it comes to benchmarking.

Though it would fairly simple to install Windows 2003 Server and some services and see how well they do under load I don't think that is a very fair comparison to a similar setup under virtualization. I don't think it is for a couple of reasons. The main ones though are CPUs and Memory. Where the 6650 has 16 Gig of Ram and 4 CPUs the virtualized version has at most 2 CPUs and 3600 MB of ram.

I suppose to figure out overhead involved with virtualization we could yank the memory and CPUs but I am not sure how much Dr. Windley will want to do that. It needs some more thought I think. Feel free to comment and tell me your ideas.

Posted by nekstrom at November 23, 2004 10:27 AM

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Comments

What about doing a baseline on the 1750 for each image and then comparing to that? If we could characterize the workload in terms of some constant * the workload of a 1750, we'd at least have a baseline.

Posted by: Phil at November 24, 2004 05:36 AM

One more thing: then the constant (for any given configuration on the virtualized set-up) can be compared, plotted, etc.

Posted by: Phil at November 24, 2004 05:38 AM

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