VMmark 2.1 has been released and is available here. We had a list of improvements to VMmark 2.0 even as we finished up the initial release of the benchmark last fall. Most of the changes are intended to improve usability, managability, and scale-out-ability of the benchmark. VMmark 2.0 has already generated tremendous interest from our partners and customers and we expect VMmark 2.1 to add to that momentum.
Only the harness and vclient directories have been refreshed for VMware VMmark 2.1. The notable changes include the following:
- Uniform scaling of infrastructure operations as tile and cluster sizes increase. Previously, the dynamic storage relocation infrastructure workload was held at a single thread.
- Allowance for multiple Deploy templates as tile and cluster sizes increase.
- Addition of conditional support for clients running Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition 64-bit.
- Addition of support for virtual clients, provided all hardware and software requirements are met.
- Improved host-side reporter functionality.
- Improved environment time synchronization.
- Updates to several VMmark 2.0 tools to improve ease of setup and running.
- Miscellaneous improvements to configuration checking, error reporting, debug output, and user-specified options.
All currently published VMmark 2.0 results are comparable to VMmark 2.1. Beginning with the release of VMmark 2.1, any submission of benchmark results must use the VMmark 2.1 benchmark kit.
In other news, Fujitsu published their first VMmark 2.0 result last week.
Also, Intel has joined the VMmark Review Panel. Other members are AMD, Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, and VMware. Every result published on the VMmark results page is reviewed for correctness and compliance by the VMmark Review Panel. In most cases this means that a submitter's result will be examined by their competitors prior to publication, which enhances the credibility of the results.
That's all for now, but we should be back soon with more interesting experiments using VMmark 2.1.