When sizing a new deployment or consolidation effort one of the questions that always comes up is how many virtual machines can be supported by a server? Unfortunately, there is not always an easy answer to this question because the workload of each virtual machine (VM) may vary greatly depending on what type of application is running. However, conducting a proof of concept test using a repeatable process allowed Dell to create a relative comparison between several different processor configurations.
For this study, a standard VM was created as a template that could be cloned multiple times. This ensured that each additional instantiation of VM would run very close to the same workload as the others. The DVD Store test suite was used to exercise the VMs so that they would consume CPU cycles and memory as well as cause disk I/O. To show the scalability potential of each configuration, additional copies of the VM were started until the host server under test ran out of physical memory.
