Release: VMware VMmark 2.1

In December last year, VMware released version 2.0 of its benchmarking framework VMmark, focussing on measuring the performance of the whole data center, including complex operations like manual and automated (or DRS-initated) vMotion, Storage vMotion, as well as virtual machines cloning and deployment.

Now VMware has made available version 2.1 of VMmark provinding usability, managability improvements and better scale-out abilities.

Changes in this release:

  • Uniform scaling of infrastructure operations as tile and cluster sizes increase.
  • Allowance for multiple Deploy templates as tile and cluster sizes increase.
  • Addition of conditional support for clients running Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition 64-bit.
  • Addition of support for virtual clients, provided all hardware and software requirements are met.
  • Improved host-side reporter functionality.
  • Improved environment time synchronization.
  • Updates to several VMmark 2.0 tools to improve ease of setup and running.
  • Miscellaneous improvements to configuration checking, error reporting, debug output, and user-specified options.

VMware mentiones that all current published VMmark 2.0 results are comparable to the Vmmark 2.1 results. Until know Cisco and Fujitsu are the only two companies publishing their results.

Also, the VMmark review panel, which reviews submitted benchmarks is expanded with Intel, other members are AMD, Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, and VMware self.