In order to be agnostic to the underlying operating environments and implementation, we have taken a high-level approach that assumes a coherent performance discipline on each constituent workload component and have presented an approach on how to aggregate these into a unified metric for comparing systems. Since there are many different user requirements for assessing and projecting performance, there is no one right answer for what workloads should be included and how they should be combined, so we have provided readers with considerations for doing this in a manner that best addresses their needs. The vConsolidate benchmark was presented as an example implementation, highlighting the compromises required in workload selection, component definition, and metric aggregation. Industry standards for measuring the performance of virtualization environments will help accelerate the performance and deployment of same. The performance discipline presented outlined a basic framework that could be used to create industry-standard virtualization benchmarks.