Todd Muirhead, DellTechCenter Engineer did some performance testing using PowerEdge R900 (4-socket, 4U) servers with Intel’s new 6-core E7450 Xeon (aka Dunnington) processors. That totals up to 24-cores in a single server with Windows Server 08 Hyper-V.  The design of the tests was to see how much additional performance could be gained with the 6-core processors when moving from 4-core processors.  I also measured the power consumption as well to be able to report the results in terms of efficiency with performance per watt.  The complete details are in the whitepaper that was published, but a quick summary is that Hyper-V was able to take advantage of the additional processing cores.  The R900 with 16 cores was able to support 30 VMs while the R900 with 24 cores was able to support 40 VMs with an  increase in performance of 18%.  Perhaps most interesting is that power consumption of the R900 actually decreased by 11% when using the 6-core processors, which resulted in a 33% improvement in performance per watt.

The details of the testing methodology and the complete results are in the paper. Please feel free to leave comments with any questions that you have.  We also have other resources on delltechcenter for Hyper-V, including video demos of SCVMM and Hyper-V Server.