VM-Aware

Here’s an interesting article about the performance overhead or ‘virtualisation tax’ as it is is so called of running a hypervisor.

In my opinion for most server workload types a 15%-20% overhead is more than acceptable when considering all the other benefits VMware brings with it.

VMotion, DRS, HA, speedy creation of new servers, simple and speedy cloning of existing servers for backup, testing and DR.  The list goes on.

I would say that maximising performance is important, but for most servers it is not the primary driver for most companies.

If you have a beast of an SQL Server, you don’t necessarily need to virtualise it.  This doesn’t mean that you should virtualise any application or web front-end servers that accompany it.

According to virtualization.info ESX 3.5 is due to be released in December this year. Lots of the rumoured functionality seems to be in tact and there is going to be an all new ESX structure. (more…)