Depending on what application you’re trying to model in your VMware test lab, there are a variety of benchmarking tools you can use to stress-test your configuration. VMware provides an extensive benchmarking suite with its VMmark and View Planner offerings.

VMmark incorporates vMotion and Storage vMotion in addition to generating a simulated user workload. View Planner uses Microsoft Office, Adobe Reader and other applications to emulate a typical user workload in a virtual desktop infrastructure, allowing you to measure application delay and user experience on numerous VMs simultaneously.

There are several other load generators available, and with the exception of the SPEC and VMware View Planner benchmarks, you can download them all for free.

File Server Capacity Tool (FSCT): This Microsoft utility drives a load on a traditional CIFS/SMB/SMB2 file server and measures the highest throughput that a server (physical or virtual) can sustain.

Exchange Load Generator 2010 (LoadGen): This Microsoft utility simulates a variety of Exchange email clients at various load levels to help you size your servers before deployment.

Exchange Server Jetstress 2010: This Microsoft utility focuses on the back-end input/output subsystem of the Exchange environment.

Dell DVD Store Database Test Suite: Also part of VMmark, this test suite simulates typical ecommerce site transactions, with built-in load generation.