VMware Inc. is making a free benchmarking tool available to IT professionals to evaluate the performance of virtualization technology in their data centers. Meanwhile, it seeks to assure competitors that the benchmarking standards will be fair to all of them.
VMmark is available for a free download and can be used to determine how well virtualization software works with any of six typical data centre workloads: file server, e-mail server, Web server, a standby server, an online transaction processing (OLTP) database and a Java order entry system. VMmark runs on either Linux or Windows.
VMware shared a prototype of VMmark in October 2006 with members of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC), an industry group that establishes performance benchmarks so customers can evaluate products. At that time, SPEC had just formed a working group to develop benchmarks for virtualization software. It is still working on those benchmarks.
Though helpful for comparing various products, benchmarks are controversial because of concerns that the results can be manipulated to make one vendor look better than another. SPEC and other industry benchmarking groups are organized to create fair benchmarks that will yield impartial results.
VMware acknowledges the skepticism about its benchmarking tool being a fair way to compare VMware with other brands, so it strove to be impartial, said Andrea Eubanks, senior director of enterprise and technical marketing for VMware.