VMmark is a freeware

virtual machine In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization/ emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve specialized h ...

benchmark Benchmark may refer to: Business and economics * Benchmarking, evaluating performance within organizations * Benchmark price * Benchmark (crude oil), oil-specific practices Science and technology * Benchmark (surveying), a point of known elevati ...

software suite from

VMware VMware, Inc. is an American cloud computing and virtualization technology company with headquarters in Palo Alto, California. VMware was the first commercially successful company to virtualize the x86 architecture. VMware's desktop software ru ...

, Inc. The suite measures the performance of virtualized servers while running under load on a set of physical hardware. VMmark was independently developed by VMware.

Technical overview

In order to measure the efficiency of the virtualization layer - the

hypervisor A hypervisor (also known as a virtual machine monitor, VMM, or virtualizer) is a type of computer software, firmware or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines. A computer on which a hypervisor runs one or more virtual machines is called ...

- the suite must run several virtual machines (VMs) simultaneously. Each VM is configured according to a template, three of which are provided with the VMmark software. The templates mimic typical software applications found in corporate data centers, such as

email server Within the Internet email system, a message transfer agent (MTA), or mail transfer agent, or mail relay is software that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another using SMTP. The terms mail server, mail exchanger, and MX host ...

database server A database server is a server which uses a database application that provides database services to other computer programs or to computers, as defined by the client–server model. Database management systems (DBMSs) frequently provide database-s ...

s, and Web servers. The VMmark software collects performance statistics that are relevant to each type of application, such as commits per second for database servers, or page accesses per second for web servers. VMs are grouped into logical units called "tiles". When evaluating a system's performance, the VMmark software first calculates a score for each tile, culled from the performance statistics produced by each VM, and aggregates the per-tile scores into a final number.

Software components

VMmark uses a mixture of free/open source and

proprietary software Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and i ...

in its virtual machine templates, such as Apache HTTP Server for Web servers and

Microsoft Exchange Server Microsoft Exchange Server is a mail server and calendaring server developed by Microsoft. It runs exclusively on Windows Server operating systems. The first version was called Exchange Server 4.0, to position it as the successor to the related ...

for email servers.

Industry reception

Use and reporting of results have been consistent since introduction, with 20 results posted between June 1, 2013 and June 1, 2014 out of a total of 81 results posted since its introduction at the end of 2012. , four computer system vendors (

Dell Computer Dell is an American based technology company. It develops, sells, repairs, and supports computers and related products and services. Dell is owned by its parent company, Dell Technologies. Dell sells personal computers (PCs), servers, data s ...

, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun Microsystems) had submitted VMmark benchmark results to VMware. By October 2009 that had increased to 10 vendors (HP, NEC, IBM, Unisys, Sun, Dell, Inspur, Lenovo, Fujitsu and Cisco)

References

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External links

VMmark product page
- VMware, Inc.
VMmark white paper
- VMware, Inc.
Virtualization committee
- SPEC VMware Benchmarks (computing) Virtualization software