VMware has finally rolled out its virtualization benchmark solution called VMmark, which is the result of two years of engineering design, collaboration with partners, and review of extensive customer survey data. The company hopes that VMmark can provide its customers and partners with a robust, reliable way to measure the performance of applications running in virtualized environments. According to VMware, tra VMware has finally rolled out its virtualization benchmark solution called VMmark, which is the result of two years of engineering design, collaboration with partners, and review of extensive customer survey data. The company hopes that VMmark can provide its customers and partners with a robust, reliable way to measure the performance of applications running in virtualized environments. According to VMware, 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.“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.” Some of the significant changes made since the public beta are listed below: The VMmark distribution is now packaged as a .zip file. Minor tilescore bugs fixed. Reporting scripts added. Updated VM templates to better support cloning. Updated VM templates to fix DNS resolution problems. Workload parameter updates to java, file and web server workload. Memory ballooning disabled for file server template. tilescore integrated with harness. tilescore script updated to allow for html output. VMware VMmark can be downloaded free of charge, here. Software Development