I am pleased to announce the release of VMmark 2.5, the latest edition of VMware’s multi-host consolidation benchmark. The most notable change in VMmark 2.5 is the addition of optional power measurements for servers and servers plus storage. This capability will assist IT architects who wish to consider trade-offs in performance and power consumption when designing datacenters or evaluating new and emerging technologies, such as flash-based storage.
VMmark 2.5 contains a number of other improvements including:
- Support for the VMware vCenter Server Appliance.
- Support for VMmark 2.5 message and results delivery via Growl/Prowl.
- Support for PowerCLI 5.1.
- Updated workload virtual machine templates made from SLES for VMware, a free use version of SLES 11 SP2.
- Improved pre-run initialization checking.
Full release notes can be found here.
Over the past two years since its initial release, VMmark 2.x has become the most widely-published virtualization benchmark with over fifty published results. We expect VMmark 2.5 and its new capabilities to continue that momentum. Keep an eye out for new power and power-performance results from our hardware partners as well as a series of upcoming blog entries presenting interesting power-performance experiments from the VMmark team.
The power measurement capability in VMmark 2.5 utilizes the SPEC®™ PTDaemon (Power Temperature Daemon). The PTDaemon provides a straightforward and reliable building block with support for the many power analyzers that have passed the SPEC Power Analyzer Acceptance Test.
All currently published VMmark 2.0 and 2.1 results are comparable to VMmark 2.5 performance-only results. Beginning on January 8th 2013, any submission of benchmark results must use the VMmark 2.5 benchmark kit.