8. A method of testing compliance of a computing system, the method comprising: receiving a collection of rules in a first set of markup-language statements, the collection of rules representing a configuration benchmark against which a computing system is to be tested for compliance, the computing system having interconnected components including different types of hardware components; parsing the collection of rules to obtain test references to tests and comparison values used therein, the tests being defined in a second set of markup-language statements, with references to at least some of the interconnected components and their attributes as represented in a database organized as an object model of the computing system, the object model expressing physical and functional relationships among the interconnected components including the different types of hardware components; and invoking an interpreter with the test references and comparison values to perform the tests defined in the second set of markup-language statements using the comparison values, performance of the tests including: accessing the database using the references to the at least some of the interconnected components and their attributes to obtain actual values of their attributes; and performing the tests to generate results based on comparisons of the actual values and corresponding ones of the comparison values, the results indicating whether the computing system is compliant with the configuration benchmark.
13. The method of claim 8 , wherein the interconnected components further include different types of software components, and the object model expresses physical and functional relationships among the interconnected components including the different types of hardware components and the different types of software components, and wherein a rule of the collection of rules specifies a relationship between a hardware component and software component of respectively the different types of hardware components and the different types of software components, and a test of the tests is for compliance with the rule.