WebSphere Virtual Enterprise Adds Value

IBM Software Group performed a study that compared the performance of several WebSphere deployment configurations on Intel hypervisor environments. Our scenarios include WebSphere applications deployed to single WebSphere instances, WebSphere ND static clusters as well as WebSphere Virtual Enterprise dynamic cluster environments. Our hypervisor environments were configured with either dedicated/pinned CPU resources or dynamic CPU allocation. In a dedicated/pinned environment, each virtual CPU defined in the virtual machines was pinned to a physical CPU core, therefore, each virtual machine has its own dedicated CPU resources. In a dynamic CPU allocation environment, we over-committed the CPU resources across the virtual machines and we let the hypervisor dynamically allocate CPU resources. Therefore, the virtual machines share the physical CPU resources. The hypervisor would give the virtual machine experiencing a high workload more CPU resources relative to the other virtual machines.