Our partners at IBM have published their first VMmark result on VMware’s VMmark results page. IBM achieved an excellent result using their 16-core IBM System x3850 M2 and VMware ESX Server 3.5. Please check out the full disclosure for details. I am delighted that with IBM’s publication we now have four major hardware vendors represented on the results page. I am looking forward to working with them (and others) to generate more results not only to help our customers evaluate the trade-offs between varying virtualization platforms but also to help us build better virtualization solutions.
In other VMmark news, astute readers may notice that we have added a VMmark 1.0 version number to the results summary table. We are in the final stages of putting together VMmark version 1.1 for release. As you know VMmark 1.0 uses 32-bit workloads only. That was a good choice when the benchmark was initially defined. However, 64-bit applications and OSes are becoming more prevalant and we would like the benchmark to remain representative of a typical datacenter. To that end, VMmark 1.1 will comprise a mix a 32-bit and 64-bit workloads. We will have more to share shortly.