The Need for a Virtualization Platform Benchmark

State-of-the-art server consolidation typically collects several diverse workloads onto a virtualization platform - a collection of physical servers accessing shared storage and network resources. Traditional single-workload performance and scalability benchmarks for non-virtualized environments were developed with neither virtual machines nor server consolidation in mind. Even previous virtualization benchmarks have not fully captured the complexities of today’s virtualized datacenters. VMmark 2.0, the industry’s first multi-server datacenter virtualization benchmark, addresses this gap by including as part of the benchmark a variety of common platform-level workloads such as live migration of virtual machines, cloning and deploying of virtual machines, and automatic virtual machine load balancing across the datacenter.

VMmark 2.0: Measure Virtualization Performance with the Industry's First Virtualization Platform Benchmark

VMmark 2.0 is the first standard methodology for comparing virtualized platforms. VMmark 2.0 generates a realistic measure of virtualization platform performance by incorporating a variety of platform-level workloads such as dynamic VM relocation (vMotion) and dynamic datastore relocation (storage vMotion), in addition to traditional application-level workloads. The benchmark system in VMmark 2.0 is comprised of a series of “sub-tests” that are derived from commonly used load-generation tools and commonly initiated virtualization administration tasks.

The VMmark 2.0 benchmark features a tile-based scheme for measuring application performance and provides a consistent methodology that captures both the overall scalability and individual application performance. The total number of tiles that a multi-host platform can accommodate and the performance of each individual workload within the tile determine the overall benchmark score.

Tile-Based Virtualization Platform Benchmarking