The first version of VMmark was launched in 2007 as a single-host benchmark when organizations were at their infancy in terms of their virtualization maturity. 

VMmark 2 was launched in 2010 as a multihost benchmark. It introduced infrastructure operations in addition to application-level workloads. 

VMmark 3 was introduced in 2017 to address highly robust and scalable virtualization workloads and complex infrastructure operations. Because 2018 was the year of Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, VMmark 3.1 was released in February 2019. It introduced requirements to mitigate these vulnerabilities. VMmark 3.1.1, released in 2020, is the current release of the benchmark. 

VMmark uses a unique tile-based implementation in which each “tile” consists of a collection of virtual machines running a set of diverse workloads. This tile-based approach is common across all versions of the VMmark benchmark. Since the initial release of VMmark, virtualization has become the norm for applications and these applications have evolved. The workloads that are run in the VMmark tiles have also evolved to provide the closest to real-world metrics for users to assess the virtual environments, as shown in the following figure: 

Figure 2.   Number of virtual machines in tiles across versions of VMmark benchmark