You might feel stuck, if you have large and business-critical database applications on expensive UNIX RISC systems. The number of applications running on virtualized systems has jumped, but many businesses have questioned whether industry-standard Intel-based servers could deliver the performance needed to consolidate applications via virtualization.

Principled Technologies did a study to see if VMware vSphere on Xeon could meet the challenge. They ran four large database applications simultaneously, each with a 200GB database in its own virtual machine. Wonder how they did?