One year and a half after its launch, the benchmarking platform that VMware called VMmark got some serious traction among OEMs.
The results page shows more than 30 analysis submitted by the biggest OEMs, including Dell, HP, IBM, Sun and Unysis.
Easily to predict, VMmark got zero acceptance from the other virtualization vendors, making the tool only partially useful.
Despite that, VMware competitors, did nothing to seriously develop a common standard or at least to adopt the only alternative available today: Intel vConsolidate.
Their only action in the last 18 months has been to join the SPEC virtualization benckmarking group. It’s unclear what progress the project made so far.
While waiting for the SPEC, VMware is trying to further involve the industry players by forming a review panel.
In theory the panel should grant a more transparent evaluation of the submitted benchmarks, creating the conditions to widely adopt it.
In practice the panel membership is by invitation only.
The founding members of the new VMmark review panel are AMD, Dell and HP.
Unless VMware chances the admission rules and at least Citrix and Microsoft jump in the effort will not change much.