Alexandre Benson Smith wrote:

> From the Geoff post the only conclusion for me is... The guy
> used the wrong product, and standard virtualization is not
> suitable for production environment.

I can't really agree with such a sweeping statement. It all
depends on what your "production environment" is.

I work inside VMs running under VMWare Workstation for most of
the day and for most of my purposes the performance is more
than adequate. Would some things work faster directly on the
hardware, sure, but the convenience of VM has been well worth
it for me. (For most office type work the performance is not
an issue, for development the convenience of multiple platforms
and easy to recover isolated systems is just too good to miss.)

The only time I've tried doing VM work on a notebook it was
not a success - the notebook just didn't have the memory nor
a fast enough harddrive to make it workable.

However, if my production environment was a high transaction
rate database server then I would not be using this solution.
I would at least look at ESXi or Xen and possibly check out
whether dedicated drives/partitions were needed ... and for
something as easy to setup as Firebird a simple Linux install
directly on hardware is not out of the question if you find
that the VM overhead is affecting you. Like everything else
you have to measure the costs and benefits associated with
your own situation.

--
Geoff Worboys
Telesis Computing