Last Thursday SPEC accepted VMware's submission on a record-setting SPECweb2005 score. Over the weekend we posted an article on VROOM! with some of the details on this experiment, which had been many months in the making. I wanted to write some thoughts on the SPEC results (Building Block Architecture for Superior Performance) and gauge the industry's thoughts.

Is anyone surprised by this performance record? Do any of you continue to run web servers on native, unvirtualized hardware? Any ideas where this building block approach might be able to extract more throughput out of a software architecture than the traditional scale-up model?

Scott