ISS Technology Update, Volume 8, Number 2

ISS Technology Update Volume 8, Number 2

Table 1-2. Recent HP ProLiant VMmark results

System

Processors

Cores

VMmark score

ProLiant DL385 G5p

11.28 @ 8 tiles

ProLiant DL585 G5

20.43 @ 14 tiles

ProLiant DL785 G5

27.71 @ 19 tiles

Certification of VMmark results

VMware maintains a review process for validating and approving VMmark benchmarks. These benchmark scores are

published on the VMware website: http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results.html

The future for virtualization and virtualization benchmarks

Updates to the VMmark benchmark

The VMmark benchmark can be run on different versions of the ESX hypervisor, which will influence the results. When

evaluating VMmark results, it is always important to compare results that use the same software platform. As of February 2009,

the latest released platform from VMware is ESX v3.5.0 Update 3.

VMware has also released VMmark 1.1 in August 2008. VMmark 1.1 changes the operating systems for two of the virtual

machines in the VMmark tile. The Java server and Database server virtual machines now use the 64-bit versions of the

Windows and Linux operating systems respectively.

Work on an industry standard virtualization benchmark

The Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), which is responsible for developing and maintaining standardized

benchmarks used in the industry, is committed to developing standard methods of comparing virtualization performance. The

SPEC Virtualization Committee, which began as a working group in late 2006, is currently working to create an industry

standard benchmark that can be used to evaluate virtualization performance for data center servers. While a specific release

date for this benchmark has not yet been set, the SPEC Virtualization Committee‘s efforts are readily available at

http://www.spec.org/specvirtualization. Both HP and VMware, along with many other leading companies, are members of

SPEC as well as participants in the Virtualization Committee.

Additional resources

For additional information on the topics discussed in this article, visit the following websites:

Source

Hyperlink

VMware VMmark homepage

http://www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/

SPEC Virtualization Committee

homepage

http://www.spec.org/specvirtualization/

Overview of the VMmark

benchmark on HP ProLiant servers -

white paper

ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/products/servers/benchmarks/VMmark

_Overview.pdf

HP VMmark page

http://www.hp.com/go/vmware/vmmark