Recent Posts

Introducing VMmark ML

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VMmark has been the go-to virtualization benchmark for over 12 years. It’s been used by partners, customers, and internally in a wide variety of technical applications. VMmark1, released in 2007, was the de-facto virtualization consolidation benchmark in a time when the overhead and feasibility of virtualization was still largely in question. In 2010, as server Read more...

VMmark 3.1 Released

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It is my great pleasure to announce that VMmark 3.1 is generally available as of February 7, 2019! What’s New? This release adds support for persistent memory, improves workload scalability, and better reflects secure customer environments by increasing side-channel vulnerability mitigation requirements. Visit our main VMmark HTML page for more information. Please note that VMmark 3.0 will Read more...

Addressing Meltdown/Spectre in VMmark

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The recently described Meltdown/Spectre vulnerabilities have implications throughout the tech industry, and the VMmark virtualization benchmark is no exception. In deciding how to approach the issue, the VMmark team’s goal was to address the impact of the these vulnerabilities while maintaining the value and integrity of the benchmark. Applying the full set of currently available Read more...

Introducing VMmark3: A highly flexible and easily deployed benchmark for vSphere environments

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VMmark 3.0, VMware’s multi-host virtualization benchmark is generally available here.  VMmark3 is a free cluster-level benchmark that measures the performance, scalability, and power of virtualization platforms. VMmark3 leverages much of previous VMmark generations’ technologies and design.  It continues to utilize a unique tile-based heterogeneous workload application design. It also deploys the platform-level workloads found in Read more...

Measuring Cloud Scalability Using the Weathervane Benchmark

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Cloud-based deployments continue to be a hot topic in many of today’s corporations.  Often the discussion revolves around workload portability, ease of migration, and service pricing differences.  In an effort to bring performance into the discussion we decided to leverage VMware’s new benchmark, Weathervane.  As a follow-on to Harold Rosenberg’s introductory Weathervane post we decided to Read more...

Comparing Storage Density, Power, and Performance with VMmark 2.5

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Datacenters continue to grow as the use of both public and private clouds becomes more prevalent.  A comprehensive review of density, power, and performance is becoming more crucial to understanding the tradeoffs when considering new storage technologies as a replacement for legacy solutions.  Expanding on previous articles around comparing storage technologies and the IOPS performance Read more...

vSphere 5.1 IOPS Performance Characterization on Flash-based Storage

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At VMworld 2012 we demonstrated a single eight-way VM running on vSphere 5.1 exceeding one million IOPS.  This testing illustrated the high end IOPS performance of vSphere 5.1. In a new series of tests we have completed some additional characterization of high I/O performance using a very similar environment. The only difference between the 1 Read more...

1millionIOPS On 1VM

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Last year at VMworld 2011 we presented one million I/O operations per second (IOPS) on a single vSphere 5 host (link).  The intent was to demonstrate vSphere 5’s performance by using mutilple VMs to drive an aggregate load of one million IOPS through a single server.   There has recently been some interest in driving similar Read more...

Analysis of Storage Technologies on Clusters using VMmark 2.1

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Previous blog entries utilizing VMmark 2.1 introduced the benchmark, showed the effects of generational scaling, and evaluated the scale-out performance of vSphere clusters.  This article analyzes the performance impact of the type of storage infrastructure used, specifically when comparing the effects of Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs; often referred to as SSDs) versus traditional SCSI HDDs.  Read more...

Exploring Generational Scaling with VMmark 2.1

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The steady march of technological improvements is nothing new.  As companies either expand or refresh their datacenters it often becomes a non-trivial task to quantify the returns on hardware investments.  This difficulty can be further compounded when it’s no longer sufficient to answer how well one new server will perform in relation to its predecessor, Read more...