What are some specific requirements for developing such a benchmark?
Besides the need to capture key performance characteristics of virtual systems, an appropriate virtual machine benchmark must employ realistic, diverse workloads running on multiple operating systems. Further, there is a need to define a single, easy to understand metric while ensuring that the benchmark is representative of various end user environments. The benchmark specification needs to be platform neutral and should also provide a methodical way to measure scalability so that the same benchmark can be used for small servers as well as larger servers from different hardware vendors.
