VMware ESX Server Performance on Dell PowerEdge 2850 and PowerEdge 6850 Servers

VMware ESX Server software enables many different applications to run on the same hardware at the same time. ESX Server provides the virtualization layer that resides just above the hardware to create Virtual Machine (VM) containers. Because each VM is isolated by ESX Server from the other VMs in the same way that physical systems are isolated from each other, ESX Server offers flexibility for concurrently running multiple types of applications and operating systems. In a typical ESX Server farm, many different operating systems and applications run concurrently on the same physical server. To measure the performance and scalability of ESX Server on eighth-generation Dell PowerEdge servers, Dell engineers modeled and tested a variety of workloads.