At ORCS Web we have been running VMWare VI3 for a few months now and have done quite a lot of testing and also closely watched real-world production operation of servers on this platform. After reviewing all the data, we can confirm that a “server” running on this platform (what we call an AI Server [Advanced Infrastructure Server]) with a single vCPU and 1GB of RAM performs almost exactly where the recent generation of single-core servers performed (which also had 1GB of RAM, hardware RAID, and SCSI drives).

Obviously the newest servers have multi-core – most already moved past dual-core and into quad-core as the standard – but from experience and support for thousands of customers I can realistically say that single-core is fine for more than 9 out of 10 applications. There are obviously some applications that are more intense and require more horse-power – we support a decent number of those also – but those situations most commonly deploy into a front-end webfarm to handle the higher resource needs of the web part, and for the database side they do often require multiple cores (though just as importantly lots of RAM and an optimized disk IO solution is important).

The AI Server product at ORCS Web is an excellent solution for most customers – especially for web and application servers. Not only is the performance quite impressive, but the fact that it is a webfarm (or cluster, or cloud, depending on your definition) of servers provides the ability to handle short extreme bursts beyond normal resources, the ability to stay online through hardware maintenance, and the ability to balance resources across the nodes to optimize server resources (without any service interruption).

This isn’t just a post about VMWare performance though, so let me mention Microsoft’s Hyper-V product. This product is still in beta so we have not launched a formal product offering on it yet, but we have done some initial testing on it. So far the tests have been very good. Surprisingly good really – based on our expectations from years of supporting Microsoft Virtual Server.

The one drawback that we’ve seen so far – which could very possibly be due to a few explainable factors – is that the disk IO requirements are quite a bit more intensive than the comparable VMWare product. This could though be due to a lack of updated and optimized SAN drivers for Windows Server 2008 or just due to the fact that it is still in beta and they’re working on that part still. Overall though we have a great first feel for the new Hyper-V solution and are really looking forward to supporting it when it is officially released.

Happy Hosting!

~Brad