z/VM virtualization performance

The paper analyzes the performance of the z/VM virtualization features when scaling WebSphere Application Server 6.0.2 environments on an 8-way server. Each environment is a server triplet consisting of an IBM HTTP server, a WebSphere application server and a DB2 UDB database server, where each server resides on an individual Linux guest. Up to 15 systems are defined running on virtual hardware provided by one System z. The work load and the number of server triplets were scaled, which leads finally to an environment having 2.5x more virtual CPUs than physical CPUs.

Published September 2007