Benchmarking an Optimized RHEL (KVM) Virtualization Environment

Using industry-standard SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmarks, performance of several different virtualization environments was compared. Of those that were tested, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (with KVM) showed significantly better performance providing a SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) environment, as compared to other virtualization environments on similar hardware.

This article provides highlights of the SAP SD benchmark results. For in-depth descriptions of these results, see:

SAP-SD Benchmark running in a VM – Leadership Performance using RHEL 6 / KVM

For further information comparing different hardware configurations when testing RHEL (KVM) workloads, refer to this article:

Leadership SAP-SD Benchmark using RHEL 6.2

SAP SD Benchmarks Highlights

Here are some of the key points that are covered in the SAP-SD Benchmark running in a VM – Leadership Performance using RHEL 6 / KVM reference architecture:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (using kernel-based virtual machine, KVM, technology) leverages the latest hardware virtualization capabilities provided by Intel and AMD processor platforms.

• Memory and CPUs can be dynamically added or removed from a guest, so those resources can be added as a virtual machine needs them to finish a job and release when they are no longer needed.

• A Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 KVM virtual machine achieved 85% efficiency on SAP SD benchmarks compared to the same RHEL 6 system on bare metal (see the reference architecture for details about the hardware configuration).

• Simulating common end-user order transactions, a virtual machine running on a RHEL 6 KVM virtual host was able to support the highest number of concurrent users. A RHEL 6 virtual machine running on a RHEL/KVM host (using IBM hardware and DB2 database) demonstrated 10,700 concurrent users performing the transactions. By comparison, the two other major virtualization environments tested achieved 4,600 and 501 concurrent users, respectively. Again, see the reference architecture for details about these configurations.