Thanks a lot for all the feedback everyone. Regarding epping's question - how did we measure performance? We measured the performance of 4 web-applications each running as a Windows 2000 Serve...
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Thanks a lot for all the feedback everyone. Regarding epping's question - how did we measure performance? We measured the performance of 4 web-applications each running as a Windows 2000 Server guest. We used a web client test tool which measures the time required by the servers to process a set of requests generated by the client. It should provide a very objective measurement of the performance of the servers. Anyway, it seems like we must have had some problem with our specific configuration. We installed VI3 onto the brand-new Dell 1950 and used VMWare converter to move over 4 VMs from VMWare Server and then carried out the performance tests. We are committed VMWare fans, so based on the feedback received here, we'll go back and try again. This time we'll try new VMs created directly on ESX and see if maybe the conversion process caused the problems.
I didn't get an answer, so I'll answer it myself :). When you boot the converted XP machine, you'll be told its an OEM license. You can do one of two things: (1) Upgrade the original machine ...
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I didn't get an answer, so I'll answer it myself :). When you boot the converted XP machine, you'll be told its an OEM license. You can do one of two things: (1) Upgrade the original machine from OEM to non-OEM XP license and then convert. (2) Boot the new VM with its CDROM pointing to an non-OEM XP installation disk and invoke a repair on the booting machine.
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 ...
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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...
So you repaired the VM, not the original PC, right? I have the same problem with an old PC which I connect to occasionally - I'd like to avoid repairing XP on the PC itself in case it breaks it.