Quoting from Techworld:
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In the light of VMware’s apparent policy reversal on the issue of virtual machine benchmarking, the company’s senior director of enterprise and technology marketing Andrea Eubanks explains the company’s stand on VM benchmarking and the publication of results.
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Q: Why does your EULA prohibit the publishing of benchmark results? A: We endorse benchmarking but we want people to follow proper procedures. There’s not much known about benchmarking VMs.
For example, how do you make an industry standard benchmark map onto virtualisation? Take TPCC — you modify it, run multiple workloads, how do you get meaningful numbers? Our EULA provides guidance on how to do this and we want to help people get the right numbers. We want people to use VMmark and learn how to benchmark virtual systems.
We’re considering changing the EULA to make it more effective – for example, in education. We’ll allow academics to publish benchmarks without restrictions because they’re not commercial entities. Also, people can apply to publish a benchmark and we approve three to four benchmarks per week.
And the EULA will change. We’ll make it easier to benchmark when using hardware virtualisation. We’ll allow the publication of benchmark results as long as you disclose the environment and content of the test…
Read the whole article at source.