Demartek Emulex HBA VMware Product Evaluation

16 April 2007

Emulex Corporation commissioned Demartek to evaluate the performance of Emulex Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) in the VMware ESX Server environment, and compare this performance to the equivalent QLogic HBA. Storage performance characteristics and implementation details are different when running in virtual environments such as VMware with guest operating systems as compared to running a native operating system on a server. Emulex sought an independent view of its Fibre Channel HBA performance in a VMware environment. This report shows the results in a four virtual machine environment.

A series of identical IOMeter tests were run in the VMware environment with four virtual machines. These tests spanned a wide range of block sizes, from 512 bytes to 1 Megabyte, and included sequential reads and sequential writes. IOMeter tests were run for each HBA and each VM configuration, resulting in four sets of results for reads and writes. Several characteristics were measured, including I/Os per second (IOPS) and Megabytes per second. The results of the 4-VM runs for block sizes up to 8K are shown in the body of this report.

View the Emulex HBA VMware Product Evaluation (PDF, 193 KB)

Emulex is a registered trademarks of Emulex Corporation.
QLogic is a registered trademark of QLogic Corporation.
VMware is a registered trademark of VMware, Inc.