By
Damon Poeter
24 July 2007 07:57AM
Tags:
vendors | team | benchmarking | virtualization
VMware's VMmark release marks achievement of first of nine milestones in 11-vendor SPEC benchmarking project.
VMware has released VMmark, the first iteration of a virtualization benchmarking project involving 10 other key vendors under the aegis of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC).
VMware collaborated on the project with AMD, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems and SWsoft in a working group formed last October by SPEC, a standards body for performance benchmarks. The release of VMmark, a benchmark system for measuring the performance of applications running in virtualised environments, comes after the achievement of the group's investigatory phase, the first of nine milestones in SPEC's rigorous benchmarking process, said Andrea Eubanks, VMware's senior director of enterprise and technical marketing.
VMware launched the benchmarking project to get answers for key questions about how to best run a virtualized environment, she said. "For example, our partners need to know, 'What's the best practice for the number of machines I can run on a virtual platform?' We've been working on answering this for years," Eubanks said.
But with the process still in its first stages, friction between the participating vendors is already evident. While open source operating systems can be readily packaged as virtual appliances, the same can't be said for Windows due to licensing restrictions, Eubanks said. "But we expect users to pressure vendors with restrictive licensing schemes to open their licenses to allow this," she said. Asked if she was specifically referring to Microsoft, Eubanks said, "Yes. That's who I'm referring to."