Application Workloads and Performance

It's no secret, we love performance tuning at AnandTech IT. It is simply in our blood to want to get the very best out of each platform available to us, and especially on as sticky a subject as virtualization. During the past year of intensive virtualization research at our lab, and the building up of our own "real world" benchmark suite, we have encountered countless applications that take quite a bit of work to get performing as expected with virtualization.

We know that in the past, virtualization vendors' claims of virtualization providing virtually no overhead "out of the box" tended to be rather blatantly false. Their claims considered only CPU-intensive applications, requiring little of any other resource, ruling out I/O-intensive platforms like databases as ripe for virtualization. At this year's VMworld, VMware sought to see this perception changed, by organizing several sessions that focused solely on the performance of exactly these kinds of applications.

This series of two articles will be a culmination of those sessions, mixed with our own experiences with performance optimization. The aim is to help our readers with a virtualized data center to avoid the common pitfalls and feel confident in their ability to get the most out of the technology.

Naturally, we don't like just handing out this information without any context to our readers. As IT researchers ourselves, we are all too familiar with the "random web search approach", where you need to find a fix for something quick and end up trying out the first one the search results offer - sometimes with disastrous results. For that reason, we want to bring you answers and solutions, only with a dash of knowledge added in.