VMware just published a new benchmark on its VMmark results page.
The tested hardware this time is a HP ProLiant DL585 G5 powered by four Quad-Core AMD Opteron 8360 CPUs (16 cores total) @ 2.5GHz with 64GB RAM.
The tested platform is VMware ESX 3.5 Update 1 (build 82663) with no additional software.
This quad-core system is currently the fastest among the ones listed by VMware, winning over Dell, IBM and Sun machines in the same range. But to be fair we have to note that while the HP machine scores 14.74 serving 10 tiles (60 virtual machines), the Dell PowerEdge M905 scores a slightly lower result, 14.28, serving 11 tiles (66 virtual machines).
There’s a major difference between the two systems: the former runs a VMware ESX 3.5 Update 1 while the latter runs the Update 2. It would be interesting to know if (and how much) the update level impacts on the overall performance.
Read the whole analysis here.