What is vBenchmark?
Last week VMware released their latest fling (an unsupported) utility called vBenchmark. According to the website;
vBenchmark measures the performance of a VMware virtualized infrastructure across three categories:
- Efficiency: for example, how much physical RAM are you saving by using virtualization?
- Operational Agility: for example, how much time do you take on average to provision a VM?
- Quality of Service: for example, how much downtime do you avoid by using availability features?
Is it worth deploying?
The answer will depend largely on whether you need metrics and, if you do, what tools or metrics you already have for your virtual infrastructure.
- Do you know your vRAM usage given the new licensing scheme for vSphere5?
- Do you struggle to justify the purchase of a new host?
- Do you need to quantify the benefits of svMotion?
If you already run Veeam Monitor, vKernel’s vOperations or even vCenter Operations you may already have all the ‘ammo’ you need, but even though those tools can provide the information it’s sometimes hard to see the wood for the trees. vBenchmark is very simple but that’s its strength – it’s free, easy and quick to setup (it’s supplied in .OVF format) and gives you some useful (and some not so useful) information right away.
Having just upgraded to vSphere5 I was curious to see how much vRAM we were using. The licence portal in vCenter doesn’t do a very good job and only shows an overall view. vBenchmark lets you break down the statistics to various levels, of which per cluster I found the most useful;
