Hi,
I have spent the better half of this year planning and finishing preparing to migrate some large databases on to virtual machines running on top of VMware vSphere.
While working through specs and other stuff I read up on loads and loads of forums, white papers, guides and anything else I could find on the subject.
In my research I started to find more and more posts that mentioned issues with drivers and/or firmware on VMware hosts, and not specific to any one vendor. Of course this worried me somewhat. So I did some more research on this.
My conclusion was very simple after reading through a lot of blog posts and speaking to multiple experts on VMware ESXi. Since we are seeing larger and larger mission critical systems virtualized we are pushing the hardware a lot more then we have done normally. And when we push the hardware to 70%, 80% or even 100% utilization, flaws that were hidden before are often more visible then they have been in the past when systems were only utilized at like 30-40% of the resources that were available to the operating system.
Just thought I should write this down….especially since I am watching one of my DB hosts pushing its CPU hard! 🙂
Bgrds,
Finnur