Fake server beats real server on Web test
Found on The Register on Monday, 16 February 2009
Server virtualization juggernaut - well, at least on x64 iron - VMware is beside itself with glee that a virtualized Linux server running atop ESX Server hypervisor narrowly beat out real Linux boxes on a popular Web serving benchmark test.
Unfortunately for anyone trying to figure out what overhead ESX Server imposes, VMware's VMark benchmark is explicitly designed to obfuscate any calculations you might want to make.
I don't know how much different ESX is from ESXi, but when playing around with the free release, all the virtual machines on it went AWOL after an update. Sure, the datastore can be brought back online by meddling with some advanced settings and a manual re-import, but for real-world usage, that doesn't cut it. At least the default actions, like updates, are expected to work without any problems.