Simplicity Across Clouds Is Rare
91% of executives are looking to improve “consistency across [their] public cloud environments."
Applications Need to Be Modernized
68% of developers want to expand use of modern application frameworks, APIs and services.
Distributed Work Models Are Here to Stay
72% of enterprise employees are working from non-traditional environments.
Security Is a Top-Down Concern
Risk related to security, data and privacy issues remains the #1 multi-cloud challenge.
Give developers the flexibility to use any app framework and tooling for a secure, consistent and fast path to production on any cloud.
Deliver security and networking as a built-in distributed service across users, apps, devices, and workloads in any cloud.
Operate apps and infrastructure consistently, with unified governance and visibility into performance and costs across clouds.
Empower your employees to be productive from anywhere, with secure, frictionless access to enterprise apps from any device.
Run enterprise apps and platform services at scale across public and telco clouds, data centers and edge environments.
Get on a Faster Path to Prod
Build and deploy quickly and securely on any public cloud or on-premises Kubernetes cluster.
Simplify Kubernetes Operations
Build and operate a secure, multi-cloud container infrastructure at scale.
Pair with App Development Experts
Unlock value by modernizing your existing apps and building innovative new products.
Build, run, secure, and manage all of your apps across any cloud with application modernization solutions and guidance from VMware.
11 Security Practices to Manage Container Lifecycle
Get recommended practices for DevSecOps teams that desire a more modern app methodology.
Scale Your Business & Innovate
Secure, run, and manage modern apps at scale, across clouds with consistent operations, higher speed, and reduced risks.
Accelerate Cloud Transformation
Modernize infrastructure, ops and apps to reduce cross-cloud complexity, lower costs, and improve security.
Empower a Hybrid Workforce
Enable anywhere work with broad effective security, a frictionless employee experience, and reduced cost and complexity.
Run enterprise apps at scale with a consistent cloud infrastructure across public clouds, data centers and edge environments.
VMware Research: Multi-Cloud Strategies
Learn why enterprises find multi-cloud strategies critical for success.
Deliver an Engaging Experience
Put employees first with device choice, flexibility, and seamless, consistent, high-quality experiences.
Secure Today’s Anywhere Workspace
Ease the move to Zero Trust with situational intelligence and connected control points.
Automate the Workspace
Manage to outcomes — not tasks — with intelligent compliance, workflow and performance management.
Enable any employee to work from anywhere, anytime with seamless employee experiences.
Remote Work Is No Longer Optional
Shift from supporting remote work to becoming an anywhere organization.
Secure & Connect Workloads
Operationalize consistent security and networking across apps, users, and entities with transparency built into our tools.
Protect APIs — the New Endpoints
Increase app velocity and centrally manage, secure, connect, and govern your clusters no matter where they reside.
Be Future-Ready
Get built-in threat intelligence spanning users, endpoints and networks to evolve your protection in a dynamic landscape.
Deliver security and networking as a built-in distributed service across users, apps, devices, and workloads in any cloud.
Protect Your Multi-Cloud Environments
Discover the unique characteristics of malware and how to stay ahead of attacks.
Work with a VMware Partner
Partners deliver outcomes with their expertise and VMware technology, creating exceptional value for our mutual customers.
Become a Partner
Together with our partners, VMware is building the new multi-cloud ecosystem positioned to become essential to our customers.
With thousands of partners worldwide, we are positioned to help customers scale their business, drive innovation and transform their customer experience.
Working Together with Partners for Customer Success
See how we work with a global partner to help companies prepare for multi-cloud.
Besides the need to capture key performance characteristics of virtual systems, an appropriate virtual platform benchmark must employ realistic, diverse workloads running on multiple hosts. Further, there is a need to define a single, easy to understand metric while ensuring that the benchmark is representative of various end-user environments. The benchmark specification must provide a methodical way to measure scalability so that the same benchmark can be used for small platforms as well as larger platforms from different hardware vendors.
VMware realized the need for a next-generation virtualization benchmark to compare different virtualization and hardware platforms, which consists of multiple hosts, diverse multi-tier workloads and infrastructure operations. VMmark 3 was created as a standardized way to compare these platforms.
A VMmark tile is group of nineteen virtual machines concurrently executing a collection of diverse workloads. Each of these workloads represents a common multi-tier application workload found in today's data centers. Included in each tile are a scalable web simulation, an e-commerce simulation, and an idle machine.
Each virtual machine in a tile is tuned to use only a fraction of the system's total resources. As a tile, the aggregate of all workloads utilizes less than the full capacity of modern servers. The saturation of a system's resources and accurate measurement of server performance with VMmark 3 therefore requires the simultaneous execution of multiple tiles.
Each workload within a VMmark 3 tile is constrained to execute at less than full utilization of its virtual machine. The performance of each workload can vary to a degree with the speed and capabilities of the underlying system. For example, disk-centric workloads might respond to the addition of a fast disk array with a more favorable score. These variations can capture system improvements that don't warrant the addition of another tile. The workload throttling will force the use of additional tiles for large jumps in system performance. When the number of tiles is increased, workloads in existing tiles might have lower performance. If the system has not been overcommitted, the aggregate score, including the new tile, should increase. The result is a flexible benchmark metric that provides a relative measure of the number of workloads that can be supported by a particular system as well as the cumulative performance level of all the virtual machines.
VMmark 3 was developed as a tool for hardware vendors, system integrators, and customers to evaluate the performance of their systems. Many customers will not run the benchmark themselves, but rather rely on published VMmark 3 scores from their hardware vendors to make purchasing and configuration decisions for their virtualization infrastructure.
The main use-case for VMmark 3 is to compare the performance of different hardware platforms and configurations. Organizations implementing or evaluating virtualization platforms use VMmark 3 for comparing performance and scalability of different virtualization configurations, making appropriate hardware choices, and for measuring platform performance on an ongoing basis.
It is also important to note that VMmark 3 is neither a capacity planning tool nor a sizing tool. It does not provide deployment guidelines for specific applications. Rather VMmark 3 is meant to be representative of a general-purpose virtualization environment. The virtual machine configurations and the software stacks inside the virtual machines are fixed as part of the benchmark specification. Recommendations derived from VMmark 3 results will capture many common cases; however, specialized scenarios will likely require individual measurement.
With VMmark 3, organizations have a robust and reliable benchmark that captures the key performance characteristics of virtual platforms, is representative of real world environments running multiple workloads, is hardware platform neutral, and provides a methodical way to measure scalability so that the same benchmark can be used across different vendor platforms.
A higher VMmark 3 score implies that a virtualization platform is capable of sustaining greater throughput in a mixed workload cloud environment, while experiencing data center operations in the background. A larger number of VMmark 3 tiles used to generate the benchmark means that the platform supported more virtual machines across the multiple hosts during the benchmark run. Typically a higher benchmark score requires a higher number of tiles.
If two different virtualization platforms achieve similar VMmark 3 scores with a different number of tiles, the score with the lower tile count is generally preferred. The higher tile count could be an indication that the underlying hardware resources were not properly balanced. Studying the individual workload metrics is suggested in these cases.
The workload applications in VMmark 3 have been updated to reflect modern multi-tier application design standards and technologies. VMmark 3 features a highly automated setup and tile-cloning process, and the VMmark .ova includes all the needed software in one downloadable template.
No, the workloads and load levels of VMmark 3 have changed significantly from VMmark 2.x in order to take better advantage of today's larger and more powerful server hardware. Because the VMmark 3 workloads and load levels have changed since VMmark 2.x, the VMmark 3 benchmark scores are not comparable to VMmark 2.x benchmark scores.
No. VMmark 3 provides three test types:
Benchmarkers may choose to optimize a test configuration for a particular aspect of measurement. For instance, if running with a power measurement, the benchmarker may choose to optimize for power over server performance. Representing all server performance results (both with and without power measurements) on the same results page could be misleading. In order to ensure consistent comparability of results, separate results pages are used.
To qualify as a vSAN storage result, a VMmark result must run all application workload virtual machines on VMware vSAN storage. However, these results can use non-vSAN storage hardware for infrastructure target storage and for the deploy template. For more details, see section 3.2.2 in the VMmark Run and Reporting Rules.
To view vSAN storage results, see Recently Published vSAN Storage on the VMmark Results Page.
There are a number of sources for VMmark support: