Following up on their excellent work with the Beta version of VMmark, our partners at Sun have just published their first VMmark 1.0 result, which was performed on a Sun Blade X8440 system. You can find all of the details at the VMmark results page (http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results.html).
The Sun Blade X8440 tested is a 4-socket, 8-core Opteron system in a blade form factor. I, for one, have long wondered if blade servers, with their modular design and shared I/O infrastructure, could rival the performance of rack-mounted systems. In this case, the X8440’s VMmark score stacks up well when compared to the similarly-configured Dell 6950.
Of course, performance comparisons are only one element in the equation. Once a customer’s performance needs have been satisfied, they will typically need to weigh other factors such as hardware costs, power and cooling demands, and datacenter footprint when comparing systems. However, I am delighted that VMmark can provide customers with the performance data necessary to help evaluate different systems and to make intelligent choices that suit their particular needs. Please stay tuned for more.