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