VMmark

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VMmark

VMmark is a freeware virtual machine benchmark software suite from VMware, Inc., a division of EMC Corporation. The suite measures the performance of virtualized servers while running under load on a set of physical hardware. VMmark was developed by VMware in conjunction with the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, a non-profit developer of performance benchmarks for the computer industry.

Technical overview

In order to measure the efficiency of the virtualization layer - the hypervisor - the suite must run several virtual machines (VMs) simultaneously. Each VM is configured according to a template, three of which are provided with the VMmark software. The templates mimic typical software applications found in corporate data centers, such as email servers, database servers, and Web servers. The VMmark software collects performance statistics that are relevant to each type of application, such as commits per second for database servers, or page accesses per second for web servers.

VMs are grouped into logical units called "tiles". When evaluating a system's performance, the VMmark software first calculates a score for each tile, culled from the performance statistics produced by each VM, and aggregates the per-tile scores into a final number.

Software components

VMmark uses a mixture of free/open source and proprietary software in its virtual machine templates, such as Apache HTTP Server for Web servers and Microsoft Exchange Server for email servers.

Industry reception

As of May 2008, four computer system vendors (Dell Computer, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun Microsystems) have submitted VMmark benchmark results to VMware. Additionally, Dell and Sun have separately published whitepapers with VMmark results obtained on their respective computer systems. SWsoft, one of VMware's competitors in the x86 virtualization market, has levied criticisms against VMmark regarding the realism of the simulated workloads and the choice of software platforms.