SPEC evaluating a standard for virtualization benchmarking

While VMware is preparing to show its proposal for virtualization benchmarking, VMmark, the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC) is considering to develop a standard.

Quoting for the SPEC official announcement:

The non-profit Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) has formed a new working group to develop standard methods of comparing virtualization performance for data center servers.

Current SPEC member companies committed to developing a new virtualization measurement standard include AMD, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and VMware.

In developing a new virtualization benchmark, SPEC will draw on its expertise in creating widely used system-level benchmark suites such as SPECjAppServer2004 and SPECweb2005…

Where Microsoft is in this initiative?