wcdiii
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Contributor

Virtual Infrastructure guest performance compared to VMWare Server

Having had a lot of experience with GSX and VMWare Server (we have about a 100 VMs running on six VMWare servers), we were enthusiastic to deploy ESX3.

We first took a Dell PE1850 server with dual Xeon and 4GB RAM and moved a few VMs from VMWare Server to ESX.

However, they ran so much slower than they had under VMWare Server that we decided we needed more hardware to run ESX. We switched to a Dell PE1950 with dual quad-core CPUs and 8GB RAM and tried again.

Regardless of how much CPU resources we allocated to the VMs, we could not achieve performance anywhere near that which we were seeing under VMWare server (we were measuring the performance of the Windows 2000 server guests with a test tool which tested the performance of our web application).

Both servers were on the HCL for VMWare Virtual Infrastructure 3 and both installed VI3 without problems.

We love the idea of fine-grained control over the resources allocated to the guests, but not if they run at half the speed of the VMs under VMWare Server.

Q1. Are there any published benchmarks of relative performance of identical guests under VMWare Server and VI3? What kind of performance difference should I be expecting?

Q2. What kind of server do I need to buy to make VI3 run so well that I'm not tempted to replace it with a bunch of smaller servers running faster?

I know that the real USP of VI3 is enterprise manageability etc, but its hard to recommend my customers to pay for a significant drop in performance relative to the free version...

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