Moving your Enterprise Java applications to virtualized x86 platformsgives you better utilization of resources with easier lifecycle and scalability management. Adding new instances of application servers or updating to a newer version of an application is simply faster when the Java process is in a virtual rather than a physical machine. Moving to a VMware virtualized platform provides immediate benefits:
- Better availability and dynamic scalability
- Simpler application lifecycle management
- Greater efficiency and flexibility without switching application servers
Performance is a key concern for everyone involved in deploying Java-based systems.
VMware and its partner companies have conducted many rounds of testing on various Java environments to ensure the performance of virtualized applications is close to that of the equivalent native environment. In some cases, there is no difference in the performance of the two environments.
Virtualizing Java applications causes little overhead these days, due the introduction of hardware-assist for virtualization in processor technology and the newest features of vSphere.
See the results from our testing exercises:
These reports show the performance of enterprise java applications when configured under ideal conditions. Formal benchmarking and customer experiences show that enterprise java applications can be virtualized safely.
Best practices for virtualizing Enterprise Java Applications
VMware has documented a set of best practice guidelines for virtualizing enterprise Java applications, including memory configuration, virtual CPU setup, checking disk and network I/O latencies and timekeeping functionality. We also make recommendations on how to measure your throughput and response times using a single example virtual machine:
