[CentOS] recommend benchmarking SW

[nate]

Alan McKay wrote:
> Hey folks,
>
> We've got some new hardware and are trying to figure out what best to
> do with it.   Either run CentOS right on the bare metal, or
> virtualize, or several combination options.   Mainly looking at :
>
> - CentOS on bare metal
> - CentOS on ESXi 4.0 with local disk
> - CentOS on ESXi with 1 VM running Openfiler to serve disk to other VMs
>
> And want to benchmark these 3 scenarios

Save yourself some trouble and skip the last one. Running openfiler
in a VM to serve disk to other VM's is a crazy idea.

Save yourself more trouble and think about what your going to
use the system for, if it is(or will be) a multi purpose system,
then go with ESXi, if it's a single purpose system go with bare
metal.

ESX has maximum efficiency with 1 vCPU VMs, so if you have 8
cores, you should have at least 8 VMs running.

http://portal.aphroland.org/~aphro/vmware/09Q3-perf_overview_and_tier1-pac_nw.pdf

nate