quick update from the "Professional IT" lab

We promised you a new datapoint, a new independent virtualization benchmark in "a few days". Those "few days" have become a week in good "IT at Anandtech" tradition. :-) But this wednesday, unless Murphy strikes us hard, the article will be online. It will offer a refreshing look at the virtualization performance, the result of months of work.  Liz will follow up quickly with a "performance optimization for virtualization" article.

Until then, we have updated two articles. We told you in one of our "Intel Nehalem vs AMD Istanbul" blogs, that you will have to wait for ESX 4.0 for EPT support. However, we found that "forcing hardware VMMU" (= EPT) improves performance tangible, so we wrote that ESX 3.5 update 4 has support for EPT. That is not true, at least not officially. EPT is only officially supported on ESX 4.0 (the hypervisor of vSphere 4.0).  Check out the updates that we did to the last article, as it clarifies some of the VMmark benchmarking. Our thanks goes to Scott Drummonds of VMware for the excellent info.

 

The last update can be found in our "The Best Server CPUs part 2" article. We solved the problems with our Shanghai "exchange" server and managed to get some Opteron numbers. The newest quadcore "Shanghai" opterons are clock for clock as fast as the quadcore "Harpertown Xeons. In other words, Microsoft exchange runs faster on the Xeons 54xx thanks to their clockspeed advantage, and the Xeon 55XX is still by far the MS Exchange champion. You can find the benchmarks here.So expect a lot of new content soon... New CPUs, new servers, new storage. The second part of May and June should be fun.