VMware continues its introductory campaign for the benchmarking tool they are going to launch at VMware 2006: VMmark.
This time a long essay appeared on the company management blog, The Console, detailing challenges of performance measurements in virtual environments:
Plenty of benchmarks exist to measure the performance of physical systems, but they fail to capture essential aspects of virtual infrastructure performance. We need a common workload and methodology for virtualized systems so that benchmark results can be compared across different platforms.
There are a number of unique challenges in creating sound and meaningful benchmarks for virtualized systems:
- Capture the key performance characteristics of virtual systems
- Ensure that the benchmark is representative of end user environments
- Make the benchmark specification platform neutral
- Define a single, easy to understand metric
- Provide a methodical way to measure scalability so that the same benchmark can be used for small servers as well as larger servers
Let’s take a look at these in turn…
Read the whole post at source.