SPEC has welcomed SWSoft into the virtual server performance rating group. SPEC is a organization for benchmark standards in high performance computing. Other players in the group include: AMD, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, Sun Microsystems, and VMware (listed in alphabetical order). All of these companies have taken a slightly different approach to virtualization and have huge potential market growth as virtualization expands in the future.
My Take:

SWSoft, using their variation of paravirtualization, will probably fight for server tests to show off their best features. Which isn’t wrong, all the companies are going to push their best features. But what should the virtualization standard be based on? There are a few different flavors of virtualization, mainly paravirtualization, operating system virtualization, and native virtualization. I feel that there will be two standards, full native virtualization with off the shelf software, and then full optimized os virtualization.

Looking back over the years of reading computer reviews of standard desktop computers, back to the day of the 486 and low end Pentium’s, I remember how I used to test a new computer, Solitaire. It was free, fun, and included with every version of windows. When you win at Solitaire the cards drop, the speed the cards drop is directly related to the speed of the computer. It runs faster on a Pentium then it did on my first 386. I have tried it inside of Virtual Server 2k5, with Windows 3.11 and i fill post my findings later on that. Full Native should be the first rating, how fast can 1 box run X number of VM’s with full server installs running standard stress tests. Scores could be reported as 5×800 score or 10×569 or 20×340 etc.

A simple test sequence of:

1. Local Hard Drive Access (file copy test to VHD)
2. Local Memory Access (Intensive Memory read write test)
3. Lan Access (file transfer testing across a physical network)
4. Local File Transfer (file transfer between virtual machines)
5. CPU Power Tests ( transaction processing, I always enjoy Towers of Hanoi to max out my CPU’s)

Now the advantage of running this or similar test sequence on a host system, each virtual machine will be at the same sequance in the series at the same time. So any automatic optimization to move resources between virtual machines will not pay off. When one machine needs the ram, they will all need it, when one needs the bandwidth, they all need the bandwidth.

More on this later…
Sources:

http://weblog.infoworld.com/virtualization/archives/2007/01/swsoft_assists.html

http://networkblog.itproportal.com/?p=282

http://hitechinfoguide.com/news/SWsoft-Assists-SPEC-with-Virtualization-Benchmarking/

http://www.tmcnet.com/usubmit/2006/03/09/1443686.htm