I need to setup performance tests which are run automatically triggered by a CI system. For that I want to use JMeter due to some scripts and experience already exist and I want
Use jmeter-maven-plugin: http://wiki.apache.org/jmeter/JMeterMavenPlugin.
It's the de-facto one and (as @Ardesco mentioned above) it doesn't require anything to be installed, which gives you abstraction on where JMeter executable is installed and all those kind of problems...