VMware Unveils Industry’s First Benchmark Designed to Measure Performance of Enterprise Workloads on Virtualized Environments

VMware, Inc., the global leader in software for industry-standard virtualized desktops and servers, today announced the availability of VMmark, the industry’s first benchmark system providing customers and partners with a robust, reliable 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.

“With customers asking for ways to measure and compare performance on different server platforms, VMware worked closely with partners to design and implement VMmark,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president of product and solution marketing for VMware. “We created this open benchmark to enable customers to make the best decisions about running mission-critical applications on virtual infrastructures.”

Traditional benchmarks were developed to measure the performance associated with running a single workload on a server. These benchmarks do not capture system behavior of multiple virtual machines or the ability of a server to support multiple simultaneous workloads on the same server. 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.

“Virtualization continues to spread across the IT industry as a core component of data center design. Because of this, customers need an effective method for determining how to configure their hardware to leverage this pervasive technology,” said Margaret Lewis, director, Commercial Solutions, AMD. “VMmark offers a way to evaluate multi-core AMD Opteron™ processor-based systems with virtualization software and helps us to arm our customers with the tools they need to build efficient virtualized infrastructures.”

“Dell’s goal is to simplify IT by delivering standards-based solutions that remove complexity and cost in our customers technology environments,” said Rick Becker, vice president of solutions, Dell Product Group. “By working with industry-leading partners like VMware to deliver VMmark, we’re simplifying the process of measuring critical metrics in deploying virtualized environments and empowering our customers to make well informed decisions when choosing the solution that best suits their needs.”

“HP customers are increasingly looking to virtualize their IT environments to achieve better business outcomes,” said Steve Dupree, director, virtualization software, Industry Standard Servers, HP. “VMmark will help them understand the performance implications of running in a virtualized environment and further accelerate virtualization adoption.”

“We are pleased VMware chose SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as part of this standardized virtualization benchmark,” said Holger Dyroff, vice president of SUSE Linux Enterprise product management at Novell. “SUSE Linux Enterprise Server continues to be a superior performing Linux operating system for all virtualized environments, complementing VMmark by offering customers a way of evaluating enterprise virtualization infrastructure solutions based on real workloads.”

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.