Virtualisation will confirm its status as fastest-rising datacentre trend this week at the VMworld conference in Los Angeles, with testing and benchmarking taking centre stage.

VMware will announce availability of a public beta of its Lab Manager 2.4 testing software that lets enterprise developers set up, save and tear down configurations via a portal. The product, acquired with the purchase of Akimbi in June, will be generally available next month at prices from $15,000.

“It replaces the physical model of requesting new servers that take a lot of time to set up and afterwards end up getting lost under desks,” said Richard Garsthagen, VMware technical marketing manager.

Benchmarking is also likely to be on the VMworld agenda after SWsoft and other virtualisation vendors called on testing group Spec to create a suite of tools to compare products.

“We’ve been crying out for benchmarks for years but we have to make sure we benchmark the right things to make it fair,” said Rob Lovell, SWsoft’s UK general manager. “Because the virtualisation architectures are different, there are certain things you can benchmark side by side and others you can’t.”

SWsoft’s Virtuozzo product uses operating system-level virtualisation, for example, with multiple partitions of a single OS running side by side, whereas VMware, Xen and others run multiple operating systems on one physical machine.

VMware’s Garsthagen said vendor-to-vendor comparisons are problematic. “It would be great but feature sets are also important and benchmarking can be like comparing apples and pies.”

David Turner, business development manager at virtualisation software distributor IQ-Sys, argued that in future, management of virtualisation environments will be the important issue.

VMware is also set to discuss more plans for monitoring virtualised systems at VMworld, while IBM last week introduced its Virtualisation Manager web-based dashboard.

Recent figures from market researcher IDC suggest that VMware remains the dominant player in virtualisation with a 55 percent market share for 2005, but rivals are growing.