From VMware’s Eric Horschman, The benchmarks are here, but don’t lose sight of the big picture:
If you’re considering virtualization, make intelligent use of the performance data that VMware, our partners and our competitors are providing, but don’t get overly enamored with the benchmarks. The bigger picture that includes the reliability, management scalability and security of your virtual infrastructure is always going to be more important than a single attribute like performance. John Humphreys of IDC has made the same point, “While the focus in the vendor community has been on performance (i.e., should a customer chose a paravirtualized or native virtualized path), I would suggest the efforts and energy applied to wringing out a few extra performance percentage points would be better placed in demonstrating the underlying platform stability and reliability.” VMware has taken this approach from the beginning and we’re delivering the most stable hypervisor available -– one so solid that many of our customers proudly report uptimes for their VMs exceeding 1000 days.