I saw an interesting set of benchmarks today - two similarly configured boxes with outstanding performance differences.
SAP Hardware: Advanage Linux
Two SAP benchmarks were released - one under Solaris while the other was under Linux.
2009034: Sun Fire x4270, Solaris 10, Solaris Container as Virtualization, 8vCPUs (half the CPUs available in the box), Oracle 10g, EHP4: 2800 SD-User.
2009029: Fujitsu Primergy RX 3000, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, VMWare ESX Server 4.0, 8vCPUs (half the CPUs available in the box), MaxDB 7.8, EHP4: 2056 SD-User.
SAP Benchmark: Results
What were the results?
| Vendor | ServerOS | Partitioning | RDBMS | Memory |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oracle/SUN | Solaris | Zones | Oracle 10g | 48 Gigabytes |
| Novell/SuSE | Linux | VMWare | MaxDB 7.8 | 96 Gigabyes |
| Benchmark | Solaris | Linux | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Users | 2,800 | 2,056 | Solaris 36% more users |
| Response | 0.97s | 0.98s | Solaris 1% greater responsiveness |
| Line Items | 306,330/h | 224,670/hr | Solaris 36% greater throughput |
| Dialog Steps | 919,000/hr | 674,000/hr | Solaris 36% greater throughput |
| SAPS | 15,320 | 11,230 | Solaris 36% greater performance |
| Avg DB Dialog | 0.008 sec | 0.008 sec | tie! |
| Avg DB Update | 0.007 sec | 0.012 sec | Solaris 71% faster updates |
SAP System Advantage: Solaris
VMWare has offered highly functional virtualization under Intel & AMD platforms for some time, but there are alternatives.
- Solaris has yielded significantly higher performance solution on multiple platforms (Intel, AMD, and SPARC) for years
- Solaris server required half the RAM as the Linux server, to achieve higher performance
- A single OS solution (Solaris 10) offers greater security vs a multiple OS solution (VMWare Hypervisor in conjunction with SuSE Linux)
- When partitioning servers, database license liability (under Oracle) can be reduced under Solaris Containers while they can not be reduced, under VMWare.
