Hank,

>A related story to this is the VMWare admission, in their promo materials for VSphere, that VMWare Server on its own is not appropriate for 'data intensive' applications,

Can you point me to the source ?
www.vmware.com/files/pdf/key_features_vsphere.pdf
especially mentions running "even the most data intensive production applications such as databases"
and
www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere4.0.pdf
mentioning "Meta-data-intensive operations can impact virtual machine I/O performance"
IMHO is speaking of VM-meta data, not db meta data like xCase.

tia

thomas