My father recently underwent a stress test to determine how his heart performed under load.  The result was that he needed a pacemaker.  Tripwire’s performance analysis team recently put vWire through a series of stress tests to determine how it would perform under load.

I was especially curious to find out how vWire’s embedded database, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Express would perform.  We expected it to work fine for small to moderately large environments, and expected that large environments would need to use commercial SQL Server versions.  Without boring you with all of the details, we found that:

• SQL Server 2005 Express’ 4 GB size limitation isn’t a constraint for environments with fewer than 12,000 VMs.
• Express’ performance was on par with the commercial versions of SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008 for up to 2,000 VMs.
• As the number of VMs increased beyond 2,000, the commercial versions gained a performance edge.  At about 12,000 VMs the edge was noticable - more than 25%.
• Using the Express version, vWire’s overall performance was more than acceptable up to about 12,000 VMs.  Beyond that, customers should use the commercial version.  Of course, your mileage may vary.

In summary, vWire doesn’t need a pacemaker.  It is great to work with our performance team and their huge environment that can test vWire with hundreds of hosts and thousands of VMs.

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