The Need for a Standard Virtualization Benchmark

Conventional server benchmarks in use today were designed to measure the performance of a single application running  on a single operating system, inside a single physical computer. However, these benchmarks cannot accurately measure the performance of a single application running inside a virtual machine, nor can they measure the performance of a single hardware platform used to run several virtual machines at once. As a result, there is increasing interest in a more effective solution for measuring the performance and scalability of virtualized IT environments.

VMmark: The Industry's First Virtualization Benchmark

VMmark is a free tool that hardware vendors, virtualization software vendors and other organizations use to measure the performance and scalability of applications running in virtualized environments. This virtualization benchmark software features a novel tile-based scheme for measuring application performance and provides a consistent methodology that captures both the overall scalability and individual application performance.

Traditional Benchmarking vs. VMmark Tile-Based Benchmarking

 

VMmark: The First Industry-Standard Virtualization Benchmark

VMware developed VMmark as a standard methodology for comparing virtualized systems. The benchmark system in VMmark is comprised of a series of “sub-tests” that are derived from commonly used load-generation tools, as well as from benchmarks developed by the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC®). In parallel to VMmark, VMware is a member of the SPEC Virtualization subcommittee and is working with other SPEC members to create the next generation virtualization benchmark.