I would suggest that this is apples to oranges. When you have VMware vcenter, the power is not in the inherent speed (its not the fastest) its the simplicity o

I would suggest that this is apples to oranges. When you have VMware vcenter, the power is not in the inherent speed (its not the fastest) its the simplicity of creating a cluster. If you have a network file store, its almost always going to be slower than local storage (assuming using the same hardware) thats not the point. Using a network file system/ block storage allows you to have HA disks. (or Load balancing, or much larger storage, or wider performance) With pNFS you can have Active-Active with n servers (assuming you're using Netapp(yes they are still relevant), or GPFS) As for vcenter, creating a HA cluster with ten hosts takes about 3 hours from scratch (assuming you install all ten servers at once.) Thats using the default tools, and the only thing that's scripted would be the install. (also using the vcenter appliance, not the shitty windows thing) KVM whilst much faster is so very much harder to set up, monitor and operate. Yes you can use config management, but with vmware, you don't need it. (cough, ignoring machine profiles)