I was under the impression that I/O performance, in particular, was still rather bad. The VMWare forums contain some links to http://vmfaq.com/?View=entry&Entry

I was under the impression that I/O performance, in particular, was still rather bad. The VMWare forums contain some links to http://vmfaq.com/?View=entry&EntryID=33 http://vmfaq.com/?View=entry&EntryID=33, for instance, which suggests about a 50% performance degradation for most virtualization products. Does this not apply (anymore) to ESX? I imagine it's improved somewhat, but AFAIK it can't match "real iron" speeds. I suppose that only gets worse as you add SANs, SSDs and other fun stuff. As to "buggy" - well, I consider anything with repeated severe security issues to be buggy. Just search for "VMWare vulnerability".