This paper presents workload characterization study of three top-tier enterprise applications using VMware ESX
server hypervisor. We further separate out different components (for example data, index and redo log in a database)
of these workloads to understand their behavior in isolation. We find that most workloads show highly random access
patterns. Next, we study the impact of storage consolidation on workloads (both random and sequential) and
their burstiness.