what could be the effect on performance moving from virtual VMware to Physical servers?

Question

I was wondering what could be the effect and possible advantage/disadvantage of replacing the Virtual VMWare with physical servers on performance of a web application

Answer 1

Unfortunately there's not nearly enough information to give any advice on this.

If you have one VMware ESX server on a high-end hardware box, converting it to a physical server will give you a minimal performance advantage.

But there are SO many variables here, your application could be going slower than it would on a physical machine for a number of VMware configuration reasons. Generally a properly configured VMware infrastructure in a production environment won't be much slower than the physical equivalent with the same allocated resources.

Answer 2

You need to look at where your performance is being hit - are you CPU, memory, drive, network bound? You need to understand what is slowing you down before you can even start to ask questions like this.

If you are CPU bound then can you move clients between you host boxes to even out load. If you are memory bound then can you increase the RAM assigned to the bound client. Drive bound - then you need to sort out your SAN throughput. If you are network bound then adding an additional network card to the host machine and adding an additional virtual network to spread the load can help.