The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) announced the availability of TPC-VMS, a specification which enhances the TPC’s existing suite of benchmarks. The TPC-VMS (Virtual Measurement of Single-system) specification augments TPC-C, TPC-E, TPC-H and TPC-DS benchmarks by defining the methodology for performance metrics of virtualized databases.

The TPC-VMS specification was designed with the following goals:

• Provide a consolidated system workload for three distinct databases running concurrently in a virtualized environment
• Define virtualization metrics that are based on existing TPC benchmark standards
• Outline requirements for measurement and disclosure
• Enable the industry to leverage existing TPC benchmark standards without requiring extensive implementation changes

Test sponsors may select one of the four TPC benchmark workloads (TPC-C, TPC-E, TPC-H, or TPC-DS) and run one instance of that workload in each of three virtual machines on their system under test. The three virtualized databases must have the same attributes, including the same number of TPC-C warehouses, the same number of TPC-E load units, or the same TPC-DS or TPC-H scale factors.

TPC-VMS defines four new benchmarks that are neither comparable to each other nor to the base benchmarks from which they are derived. The TPC-VMS primary performance metric takes the form of VMS"performance” including VMStpmC (for TPC-C), VMStpsE (for TPC-E), VMSQphH (for TPC-H) or VMSQphDS (for TPC-DS).

“TPC-VMS is the first specification in the industry that enables comparison of performance workloads running enterprise database applications across several virtual machines,” said Wayne Smith, chairman of the TPC-VMS committee. “TPC-VMS references current TPC specifications and, as a result, offers the industry a rapid means of running and reporting performance metrics for virtualized environments.”

The TPC-VMS specification is available for download via the following URL: http://www.tpc.org/tpcvms/default.asp