VMware has finally released the first public beta of VMmark, the company's virtualization benchmarking tool. First announced just before VMworld 2006 (the company's annual virtualization conference for developers, partners, and end-users), the latest VMmark released to the public has undergone some key changes since that original specification was developed in order to simplify benchmark setup and execution.
Some of the more important changes include the distribution of virtual appliances for the Linux-based workloads (redistributing SUSE SLES 10), distribution of an XML-based open-source benchmarking harness for STAF/STAX, reduction of the memory footprint from 7GB per tile to 5GB per tile and replacement of the database workload with SysBench running against MySQL. A comprehensive benchmarking guide with step-by-step instructions for benchmarking setup and execution is also included.
According to Bruce Herndon, a member of VMware's performance team, "VMmark is intended to measure performance in an enterprise consolidation scenario. More importantly, it is a benchmark for the entire virtualization platform. Appropriately configured CPU, memory, network, and storage are recommended. In its current form, it still requires some degree of effort to set up and run effectively."
Dell has already begun using VMmark to benchmark their Dell PowerEdge servers and have recently published a paper using it titled Virtualization Performance of Dell PowerEdge Servers using the VMmark Benchmark.
Enroll for the beta, here.