SWsoft Assists SPEC with Virtualization Benchmarking

SWsoft, the maker of the Virtuozzo operating system virtualization software, announced that it was joining the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) virtualization benchmarking party.

The group, currently made up of notable members such as AMD, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, Sun Microsystems and VMware, is working together with SPEC to develop a new virtualization measurement standard.

“As virtualization becomes a baseline technology in the data center, benchmarking of all types of virtualization technologies will be an important part of helping customers choose the right solution for their needs,” said Serguei Beloussov, CEO, of SWsoft. “We are looking forward to contributing to the process, which will help further adoption of virtualization.”

“SPEC welcomes SWsoft and looks forward to its active participation in the virtualization working group,” says Walter Bays, SPEC president.

The group is investigating the use of heterogeneous workloads that are spread across multiple virtual machines on a single server. They claim that a key aspect will be defining a methodology to model the dynamic nature of customer workloads in this environment.

With so many variables to consider – different virtualization platforms and types, various applications and operating systems to consider within the guest and host OS, and what exactly is going to be compared in this benchmark – I have to wonder exactly how long this group is going to take before a set of benchmarking standards is actually created. With virtualization implementations on the rise, now is the time for such a beast to exist to help IT organizations make an educated and informed decision.