Scaling Microsoft IIS 7 in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4/KVM environment

This paper describes the performance and scaling of an industry-standard Web benchmark, WebBench, running in Microsoft Windows Server 2008 guests under Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 using the KVM hypervisor. The host system was deployed on a Dell PowerEdge R710 G6 server equipped with 72 GB of RAM and comprising dual sockets each with a 2.66 GHz Intel Xeon E5540 (Nehalem) processor with support for hyper-threading technology, totaling 8 cores and 16 threads.

The paper illustrates the ability of Red Hat virtualization to host Internet Information Services operating under virtualized Windows Server 2008. The paper also demonstrates that for IIS, Red Hat virtualization is more efficient at scaling-out than scaling-up. In addition, the paper provides some general guidelines for optimizing Web performance in such an environment.