Performance Tuning and Benchmarking VMware Workstation 6

What a perfect time to come out with this whitepaper! VMware just recently announced the release of the long awaited desktop virtualization platform, VMware Workstation 6. And now, the company has created a valuable whitepaper titled “Performance Tuning and Benchmarking Guidelines for VMware Workstation 6“.

This 34-page whitepaper provides valuable guidance in optimizing performance using VMware Workstation 6.0 and also offers a helpful performance benchmarking methodology, both of which are extremely important to people whether already virtualizing or still just thinking about it. (BTW, come on in, the water is fine!)

The preface reads:

There are some areas in which the best-performing configurations of VMware Workstation virtual machines vary slightly from the configurations of native machines. One of the goals of this book is to provide guidance about these variations. To this end, we discuss configuration of the host, the VMware Workstation software, and the operating systems and applications in the individual virtual machines.

The benchmarking guidelines in this book are intended to assist in the acquisition of meaningful, accurate, and repeatable benchmarking results. These guidelines are useful when you perform comparisons between VMware Workstation and either native systems or other virtualization products, as well as when you run benchmarks in virtual machines in general. The guidelines should not, however, be considered VMware best practices in all cases. Among other reasons, this is because benchmarking sometimes involves saturating one resource while overprovisioning others, something that would not be desirable in a production environment.

The book also includes examples of common pitfalls that can impact performance or affect the accuracy or relevance of the results obtained by benchmarking tests.

You can download the whitepaper, here.