On Nov 3, 2009, at 8:22 AM, Alan McKay <alan.mckay at gmail.com> 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 > > So far all we have is a dd-based disk IO benchmark. > > What else can you all recommend. > > BTW, we also ideally want to try each of the above with a Postgres DB > as well (and once without) Take a look at iozone it is a little dated, but still good and is cross platform so you can can have a level playing field between Linux, Windows and Solaris. I'd be interested in hearing your results. I will tell you it will be slower then bare metal, that is just a fact of life, but with adequate hardware it may be more then acceptable. It would allow a VM to fail-over for another though which is key in a HA situation like storage. -Ross