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InovaWave Virtual Machine Performance Optimization

Saturday, 28 October 2006 by Michel Roth

Dave Marshall blogged on Infoworld.com about a new product by a company called InovaWave. They focus on virtualization performance and efficiency management: "Through the use of their innovative software solution, InovaWave claims that they can increase virtual machine density and performance at the same time."

"Their secret sauce is called DXtreme and it looks as though it installs on top of a Windows platform. When asked which virtualization platforms it supports, Dave McCrory, CTO and Co- Founder of InovaWave, responded that it would work with most virtualization platforms today that install on top of either Microsoft Windows XP Pro, Microsoft Windows 2000, or Microsoft Windows Server 2003, which really opens it up to quite a wide list of platforms that include: VMware Player, VMware Workstation, VMware Server, Microsoft Virtual PC, Microsoft Virtual Server, and Parallels Workstation for Windows."

"Using a testing and benchmarking tool from PassMark Software, I was able to gather a number of performance metrics. After stopping the DXtreme software, I ran the same set of PassMark tests against this same virtual machine configuration. Needless to say, I was quite impressed with the results. Without DXtreme, the PassMark Advanced Disk Test reported a result of 2.35MB/sec. After performing the same test with DXtreme running, the test result increased to 21.08MB/sec."

"While the previous test showed a huge performance boost, I still expected that running two virtual machines with half the memory footprint would take my laptop down at the knees. When I powered both virtual machines on, I waited for the moment of truth. Within about a minute and a half, both Windows Server 2003 virtual machines were up and running, and once again, the PassMark Advanced Disk Test told the story. Running two virtual machines with a 256MB footprint and no DXtreme produced .95MB/sec for the first VM and 1.01MB/sec on the second. Once again, after enabling the optimization software, the test results reported an increase. The first virtual machine now reported 17.05MB/sec and the second reported 18.95MB/sec."

"Although impressive, my tests were limited to a 1GB laptop. Try it out for yourself in your own environment, using your own virtual machines. A free 15-day trial license of DXtreme can be requested by contacting InovaWave."

Read it all here.