Capacity Study of a Virtual Web Server Farm

As the use of virtual machines grows inside data centers, it becomes increasingly important for administrators to understand how a virtual environment will behave under normal workloads and as it scales across several physical servers. In such an environment, the impact of common virtualization operations like dynamic resource scheduling becomes important considerations in the design of the overall architecture. This paper provides insight into the behavior and performance of a Web server workload running in a virtualized environment using PowerEdge™ blade servers, EqualLogic™ PS Series arrays and VMware® vSphere™.

The goal of the evaluation is to measure the capacity and demonstrate the suitability of the virtual infrastructure for demanding real-world applications. Various aspects such as dynamic resource scheduling, dynamic power management, high availability and serviceability are explored in detail.

The architecture of the virtual Web server farm is based on Dell Business Ready Configurations. Dell Business Ready Configurations for virtualization provide a good starting point for customers who are looking for simple and adaptive virtual infrastructure for their applications.