05.11.2010 - Surveying Virtualization Performance Trends with VMmark

The trends in published VMmark scores are an ideal illustration of the historical long-term performance gains for virtualized platforms. We began work on what would become VMmark 1.0 almost five years ago. At the time, ESX 2.5 was the state-of-the-art hypervisor. Today’s standard features such as DRS, DPM, and Storage VMotion were in various prototype and development stages. Processors like the Intel Pentium4 5xx series (Prescott) or the single-core AMD 2yy-series Opterons were the high-end CPUs of choice. Second-generation hardware-assisted virtualization features such as AMD’s Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) and Intel’s Extended Page Tables (EPT) were not yet available. Nevertheless, virtualization’s first wave was allowing customers to squeeze much more value from their existing resources via server consolidation. Exactly how much value was difficult to quantify. Our VMmark odyssey began with the overall goal of creating a representative and reliable benchmark capable of providing meaningful comparisons between virtualization platforms. - View Press Release - Visit VMware, Inc.