Hi !

> Further, most VM Host software actually has a very low overhead.
>
> If that wasn't the case, no-one would be moving major applications like email and database servers to VMs.
>
>
> Sean
>

The Sysadmin from one of my costumers decide to install vmware on a new
server (2x Quadcore, 8 GB RAM, 4 x 500 GB SATA on RAID10).

Prior to the vm instalation, the hourly nbackup complete in 8 seconds,
on vm machine it took around 8 minutes ! (60x slower !) (nbackup + 7zip
the file)
A back-up using gbak on bare metal takes 30 minutes (gbak + 7zip the
file), on vm 1:30h

My personal experience with vmware was just to play a bit runing Win98
inside WinXP (crazy I know, but I had a very old version of an
application that has trouble to deal with fonts in WinXP)

In the first days, at least the server stays up, on the last weeks the
vm crashed down a couple of times a day.

Note that the volume was not that big, around 60 users (120 connections)
10GB database.

For 3 weeks the firebird server are running on bare metal again,
everything fine, a lot faster, no more crashes...

I am sure that there is something very wrong with that setup, but that
was my first impression of a vm running in production and I can't say
that it didn't scared me a lot.


see you !

--
Alexandre Benson Smith
Development
THOR Software e Comercial Ltda
Santo Andre - Sao Paulo - Brazil
www.thorsoftware.com.br