In what has become a regular phenomenon, VMware’s vSphere 4 has again proved that it can deliver the highest levels of performance for the most demanding applications. In a recent benchmarking effort by ParAccel, Inc., provider of ParAccel Analytic Database (PADB), vSphere 4 delivered the industry’s first fully-audited TPC-H benchmark result in an x86 based virtual environment. A cluster of 80 virtual machines running PADB, spread across 40 physical hosts, broke the existing world records for performance[1] and price/performance[2].

Some of the key highlights of this record performance are:

• Ran 1,316,882 Composite Queries per Hour (QphH) @ 1,000GB, 13% higher than the next best performance.
• Used 40 HP servers, 37% fewer than that used for the second best performance result.
• Achieved a price/performance of US $0.70 per QphH, 7.7 times better than that of the previous performance record holder.
• Took 16 minutes and 23 seconds to load 1 TB database at a rate of 3.7 TBs per hour, a load time 8.7 times  faster than that of the previous performance record holder.

This remarkable feat shows that vSphere enables efficient utilization of hardware resources through consolidation and achieves this without compromising on performance. Organizations can confidently virtualize the world’s most demanding applications and still realize significant cost and energy savings.

The setup used for this record feat was,

Servers:
40 x HP DL 380 G6 Server, each with

• 2 Intel Xeon x5560, 2.8GHz processors ( 4 cores per socket)
•  72 GB Memory
• 8 x 300 GB (10K RPM) internal SAS Disks
• 2 x HP PCIe Dual Port Gigabit network adapters

Hypervisor:
VMware, ESXi 4.0 update 1

Virtual Machines:
Leader Node:
1 virtual machine with

• 4 vCPU
• 32 GB memory
• 4 x 279 GB virtual disk
• 5 x virtual NICs
• ParAccel Standard Linux, 64-bit 
• ParAccel Analytics Database, ver 2.5