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P e r f o r m a n c e W h i t e P a p e r
1
The term virtualization has been widely used since
the 1960s or earlier, and has been applied to many
different aspects and scopes of computing — from
entire computer systems to individual capabilities or
components. The common theme of all virtualization
technologies is the hiding of technical detail.
According to VMware, the leader in virtual infrastruc-
ture software for industry-standard systems, virtu-
alization is an abstraction layer that allows multiple
virtual machines, with heterogeneous operating sys-
tems to run in isolation, side-by-side on the same
physical machine.
ClearCube Technology offers its customers Sen-
tral™ Software to manage virtualized desktop
environments and delivers, through its blade com-
puters, a exible platform for virtualization.
As of yet, no industry standard for a performance mea-
surement exists, so ClearCube recently conducted a
study on the ways that typical users might interact with
virtualized sessions on a PC blade.
This paper provides the performance results of that
study and includes guidelines to install and cong-
ure virtualization products from VMware in similar
environments in your corporate installations. In the
study, ClearCube answers often-raised questions,
including “how many virtual machines (VMs) can be
installed in a standard conguration?” The informa-
tion provided can be used as a baseline to deter-
mine how many VMs you can reasonably utilize in
your installation environment. Later in the paper, you
will nd detailed performance thresholds for VMware
ESX and GSX. ClearCube determined these thresh-
olds during stress tests of numerous congurations.
1. Performance Summaries
The following charts provide the study results.
Throughout the paper, we will refer to these results.
In every conguration in this report, each virtual ma-
chine (VM) was congured with the following PC
blade congurations:
• Microsoft XP-SP2 Operating System
• Microsoft Ofce 2003
• 512 MB RAM (assigned to the VM)
• 4 GB of disk space
A1010 base conguration:
• Windows Server 2003 as Host OS with
Application Server congured “on”
• VMware Virtual Server 1.0.1 (aka GSX)
providing the virtualization layer
• Virtual machines; each VM OS image is
stored on the A1010’s hard drive
INTRODUCTION
GB RAM
Maximum Virtual Machines
2 3
3 5
4 6
Table 1. Performance Results for A1010 + VMware Virtual Server 1.0.1
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