Alexandre Benson Smith wrote:

> I use VM's (Oracle VirtualBox) on my notebook, the performance
> is quite good for general work, but I can see that when running
> a heavy process, such as datapump, the performance is much slow
> than running the same on the bare metal. [...]

OS Hosted virtual environments - VMware Workstation, Oracle
VirtualBox, MS Virtual PC etc - can have performance issues for
some applications, particularly when it relates to disk access
(although there are ways in which you can, at least partly,
address these for specific situations).

Things like VMware ESX and Citrix XenServer are rather different
beasts because the host is a dedicated "hypervisor", and this
makes a difference to how they perform. Another layer always
adds its own overhead but in these cases it is generally much
less intrusive.

For terminal servers a virtual machine environment is generally
very appropriate. If necessary you can isolate the database
server to its own hardware - but I would suggest appropriate
testing under various configurations before you did that.

--
Geoff Worboys
Telesis Computing