Current economic, environmental and energy constraints often do not make it possible to add additional servers in the data center to align with the demands of the business.  As a result, companies are looking to consolidate workloads on fewer servers to reclaim the underutilized capacity, lower the total cost of ownership and simplify data center management. Virtualization technologies, like VMware, on larger platforms such as the HP ProLiant DL785 G6 are key to improving server utilization.

HP ProLiant DL785 G6, with 48 processing cores, up to 512 GB memory and 11 PCI-e I/O ports, provides ample resources for very large number of virtual machines and offers a very high consolidation and virtualization ratio. The new world-record VMMark benchmark result with 53.73 score while running 210 virtual machines proves that the HP ProLiant DL785 G6 is ideal for virtualization and consolidation environments. The industry x-86 workhorse beats the nearest 8-socket competitor by almost 58% on VMMark benchmark. 

DL785 G6 shows increased scalability with the new AMD Opteron processors. As compared to the previous result on DL785 G5 (with 8 Quad-Core processors), the DL785 G6 (with 8 six-core processors) showed 70.2% increased performance. I have been asked this question many times – what makes DL785 G6 or other multi-processor ProLiant servers with the new six-core Opteron processors run more than 50% faster than the previous generation G5 servers with AMD quad core processors?

In addition to the virtualization acceleration technology like Rapid Virtualization indexing (RVI) , the newly introduced HT-Assit with six-core 8400 series AMD Opteron processors is a key contributor to the excellent performance of HP multi-processor servers including DL785 G6.

HT Assist helps reduces memory latency, improves HyperTransport bus efficiency and increases overall system performance in multi-processor systems by reducing the probe traffic and resolving probes quickly. It can eliminate the probe broadcasting in 8 out of 11 typical CPU-to-CPU transactions in a multi-processor system like DL785 G6.

These technologies help HP ProLiant servers achieve #1 virtualization performance results and near linear scaling as demonstrated on VMMark benchmark. The 4-processor DL585 G6 server shows 1.86 times scaling from 2-processor DL385 G6 server and the 8-processor DL785 G6 server shows 1.79 times scaling from 4-processor DL585 G6 server.

This unparalleled virtualization leadership is demonstrated in the AMD video featuring HP ProLiant DL785 G6 running 180 VMs! AMD will have this demo live at their booth (#1408) at VMWorld, August 31-September 3^rd 2009.

Please join us in the HP Booth (#2023) at VMWorld to see the ProLiant G6 servers, including DL785 G6, and a showcase of a wide variety of server, storage and networking virtualization solutions.