Welcome to the VMware performance blog! Here we’ll address interesting issues regarding the performance of virtualized environments. For our first entry, we’ve chosen a subject important to many people: benchmarking.
For a while now, VMware has been developing a benchmark to measure the performance of virtualized systems. The benchmark (VMmark) is specifically designed to measure the performance of various hardware platforms under mixed operating systems and mixed application consolidation scenarios. We developed the benchmark to reflect the use cases and application categories most commonly deployed by our customers. We’ve spoken about our work on VMmark with various partners and customers at VMworld 2006, as well as publicly on VMware’s Console blog and in a technical report. We’re proud to announce that the benchmark is now in beta. We’ve invited well over 20 partners, OEMs, and customers to participate in the program and use the benchmark on their systems. Some of these partners are already using the technology preview version of the benchmark and have provided us with valuable feedback on the efficacy of VMmark.
Parallel to the VMmark effort, VMware is also working to promote an industry standard virtualization benchmark. We are working with other industry members within the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) organization to develop a next generation, industry standard, virtualization benchmark. This effort, however, is longer term and doesn’t address the immediate needs customers have to compare platforms. VMmark fills that need by providing a credible, standardized methodology for customers and OEMs to use.
The VMmark beta marks an important milestone because it’s the first benchmark available for studying the performance of consolidated environments. We hope to release the public version sometime early next year. If you’d like to find out more about VMmark, contact us at [email protected].