>Well part of the issue is if you're running a single VM on a physical box, you may get 80% of the horsepower of the physical box. but what are you really gaining then? :-)

reduced price, as we need the machines only 10-15 days a month if going AWS or similar. Scalabiity, as one component not under our control needs the registry, so either get a ridicolous number of physical boxes running mostly on idle, create several boot partions on a couple of boxes or use VM's. Boot partitons would work, but data load is different each month, so VM gains better load distribution. Other otpion would be to have all needed machines replicated on a HW cluster - gain the 10% HP for the cost of always keeping the boot partitions synched. Diminishing returns and with VM switching to other HW is easier in case of trouble. To top it off, it is much easier to configure RAM in a VM ;-)

>
>The point is that VM hosting providers run a lot of VMs on shared hardware, which is supposed to bring prices down and keep performance up, but honestly VM pricing still seems pretty damn expensive compared to co-location and also to ISP style web hosting (which is dirt cheap and deals with much of the same scenarios).

no arguing that price comparison between sinple physical box and VM seems slanted.

regards

thomas