VMware, Inc.announced the availability of VMmark, a benchmark system providing customers and partners a way to measure the performance of applications running in virtualized environments. As part of VMware’s effort to promote open standards in the industry, VMmark is the result of two years of engineering design, collaboration with partners, and review of extensive customer survey data in order to accurately represent customer environments.

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, companies can use this information to make appropriate hardware choices, and compare the performance and scalability of different virtualization platforms.

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. In this way, VMmark empowers customers who are making purchasing decisions for their virtual infrastructures.

The development of VMmark is part of VMware’s larger effort to promote open standards and formats in the industry. In October 2006, as a result of a request from VMware, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), a standards body for performance benchmarks, formed a working group to develop a standard benchmark for measuring virtualization performance. Now a subcommittee, the group includes VMware as a key participant along with other partners and vendors in the virtualization industry.

VMware VMmark can be downloaded free of charge at
http://www.vmware.com/go/vmmark.

Marc Jacob B  

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August 2007