VMware has released the first public beta of a VMark, a benchmarking tool VMark. Until now, VMware has refused to allow anyone, via its licensing terms, to benchmark its products. Its change of heart is the first concrete evidence that it’s being forced by market pressure into changing its policy. VMware’s plans to produce it were first revealed last year, just before VMworld, its annual developer and user conference.
VMmark is intended to measure performance in an enterprise consolidation scenario, says Bruce Herndon of VMware’s performance team in the company’s performance-oriented blog, VROOM!. Herndon says VMark “ is a benchmark for the entire virtualisation platform and, after outlining system requirements, says: “Primary users of VMmark will be both vendors and power users wishing to characterise various virtualisation platforms.”
The benchmark has undergone changes from its original specification, including distribution of virtual appliances for Linux-based workloads, reduction of the memory footprint from 7GB per tile to 5GB per tile, and replacement of the database workload with SysBench running against MySQL.
Dell is already using VMark and in February published a study titled Virtualisation Performance of Dell PowerEdge Servers using the VMmark Benchmark.
The first beta, which was not freely available, was released on December 21. VMware is also working with other vendors to develop an industry standard virtualisation benchmark within the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) organisation.