An interesting read from Slashdot mentioned a company YippieMove who switched from VMware to FreeBSD Jails when their infrastructure ran into so many problems doing I/O that something had to change. Interestingly, BSD Jails resembles Solaris' Zones and Linux vservers.
Bottom-line is that, as the comments mention very well, you have to “know your workload before picking the technology.” Also, which hardware generation you run VMware on has a big impact. Newer hardware has a significantly better support for virtualization when compared to older generation hardware.
We've had similar I/O problems with NFS shares exported to various bare metals (BMs) and VMs and we choose to move to an ECM NAS instead (based on the number and the volumes of the shares). I doubt installing vSphere 4 on our old PowerEdge 2950 would make any difference as the old hardware is simply already stretched to its limits.
Bottom-line is that, as the comments mention very well, you have to “know your workload before picking the technology.” Also, which hardware generation you run VMware on has a big impact. Newer hardware has a significantly better support for virtualization when compared to older generation hardware.
We've had similar I/O problems with NFS shares exported to various bare metals (BMs) and VMs and we choose to move to an ECM NAS instead (based on the number and the volumes of the shares). I doubt installing vSphere 4 on our old PowerEdge 2950 would make any difference as the old hardware is simply already stretched to its limits.
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