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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