Fake server beats real server on Web test

"Yes, I know. This sounds like a perpetual motion machine, getting the hypervisor without any overhead. But the results that VMware has achieved on the SPECweb2005 benchmark test, administered by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, might say more about the limits of that benchmark than they do about any overhead that a hypervisor like ESX Server imposes on a server.

"Unfortunately for anyone trying to figure out what overhead ESX Server imposes, VMware's VMark benchmark is explicitly designed to obfuscate any calculations you might want to make. The apples to applesauce to oranges comparisons that you can make from the limited SPECweb2005 data similarly do not allow you to figure out the overhead that ESX Server imposes - and then reckon what a higher utilization level on the server for processors and memory enabled by the hypervisor might yield, thereby making it all worth the trouble."

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