WebPerformance: Load Testing a Virtual Web Application
Christopher Merrill takes an academic look and tests out the performance of virtualized servers. He notes that for the added ease of server administration, you are taking a performance hit, and can serve a fewer number of users.
We ran 4 load tests on the application. The first measured the performance of the web application running on a native Windows 2003 Server installation. The second test measured the performance of the web application running on a virtual Windows 2003 Server installation running within VMware Server 1.0.1. VMware ran on Linux (CentOS 4.4). The base hardware for both machines is a Dell Poweredge SC1420 with dual Xeon 2.8GHz processors. The virtualized server has the same memory available to it (2G) as the native server (which implies that the physical machine running VMware has more memory). Since the Intel Xeon processor supports hyperthreading, there was some debate as to the impact of hyperthreading on the virtualized machine. So we decided to run two additional tests with hyperthreading disabled for both the native and virtualized servers.
Merrill makes a point of stating that his own company transferred 7 underutilized servers to two machines with newer hardware and found an increase in performance and productivity – but that was mostly because those servers were underutilized. This is a test of peak performance.
Network World: Layer 8 – Cisco develops communication relay robots
Never a wireless access point around when you need one? Cisco may have solved that problem, albeit in a spooky way.
Cisco has developed a set of small smart robots, which can act as wireless communications relays, that sense when a mobile user is moving out of service range, and can follow the user to maintain connectivity…
Whether or not the systems has an enterprise application, it is of interest to the military and initiatives such as the Army’s Future Combat Systems which uses a variety of advanced systems to achieve battleground superiority.
One thing is for certain. There is no stopping them. The Cisco robots will soon be here. And I, for one, welcome our new wireless robot overlords. I’d like to remind them that as a trusted blogger, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their data mines…
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