First. I am very very happy that this benchmark idea has finally come to fruition.
As a newcomer to the process I wanted to make a few comments about the build/installation process. As was noted in the first posting to this forum the build process is rather lengthy and complicated. I fully recognize that complexity is a given, considering the various types of systems and workloads being put together. However, it seems to me that there are some places that we can reduce the effort a bit.
In particular the steps of building the 7 systems (yes 7, 3 windows VMs + 3 linux VMs + 1 windows Client) per tile can be resequenced to allow more leveraging of your effort. Obviously using templates is already recommended in the documentation and is definitely highly desirable.
For both sets of VMs (Windows and Linux) if you use a bit of thought and planning you can do just one OS install instead of 3. Create your VM, install the OS, install all the common software and do all of the common tweaking. Then clone that VM into the additional two VMs. Then you would do the specific workload installation steps in each VM before creating VM templates.
This alone cuts out 1-2 days of effort and elapsed time if for nothing but just waiting for W2K3 or RHEL to finish the install process.
