The non-profit Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) has released SPECvirt_sc2010, the first vendor-neutral benchmark to measure the performance of datacenter servers used for virtualized server consolidation. The new benchmark also includes options for measuring power consumption and power/performance relationships.
SPECvirt_sc2010 uses a realistic workload and SPEC’s proven performance- and power-measurement methodologies to enable vendors, users and researchers to compare system performance across multiple hardware, virtualization platforms, and applications. It was developed by the SPEC virtualization subcommittee, whose members and contributors include AMD, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intel, Oracle, Red Hat, Unisys and VMware.
SPECvirt_sc2010 provides an overall workload based on applications that are commonly used for virtualized server consolidation. Workloads of various sizes are injected into the benchmark at different time periods during the benchmark run, representing the typical spikes experienced in real-world server environments. Scaling is achieved by running additional sets of virtual machines (called “tiles”) until overall throughput reaches a peak or workloads fail to meet required quality of service (QoS) criteria.
Three categories of results can be generated by SPECvirt_sc2010:
- Performance-only results, where the overall score is calculated by taking each component workload in each tile and normalizing it against its theoretical maximum for the predefined load level.
- Power/performance for the total system (server and storage).
- Power/performance for the server only.
SPEC’s latest benchmark comes at a time when virtualization is becoming integral to datacenter management: The analyst firm International Data Corp. (IDC) reports that 18.2 percent of all new servers in the fourth quarter of 2009 were virtualized, an increase of three percent over the same period in 2008.
SPECvirt_sc2010 is available immediately from SPEC for $3,000; discounts are available for qualified non-profit and educational institutions.
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