Dr. Dobb's | VMware Releases Virtualization Benchmark

VMware Releases Virtualization Benchmark

An open, freely-available benchmark to measure virtualized environments

July 23, 2007
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/parallel/vmware-releases-virtualization-benchmark/201200423

VMware has released VMmark, an open and freely-available software tool that the company claims is the industry's first benchmark to measure the performance of applications running in virtualized environments.

According to VMware, traditional benchmarks were developed to measure the performance associated with running a single workload on a server. These benchmarks do not capture system behavior of multiple virtual machines or the ability of a server to support multiple simultaneous workloads on the same server. VMmark is the first benchmarking system that measures the scalability of heterogeneous virtualized workloads and provides a consistent methodology so benchmark results can be compared across different virtualization platforms. As a result, organizations can compare the performance and scalability of different virtualization platforms.

"With customers asking for ways to measure and compare performance on different server platforms, VMware worked closely with partners to design and implement VMmark," said Vmware's Raghu Raghuram. "We created this open benchmark to enable customers to make the best decisions about running mission-critical applications on virtual infrastructures."

Server vendors who conduct benchmark testing under the guidelines using VMmark can publish a VMmark score that provides scaling information about the workloads each product can support and the overall performance level of virtual machines running on a server.

"VMmark offers a way to evaluate multi-core AMD Opteron processor-based systems with virtualization software," added Margaret Lewis, director, Commercial Solutions for AMD, "and helps us to arm our customers with the tools they need to build efficient virtualized infrastructures."