It's awesome that you can get servers like that for those prices these days. One of my customers recently purchased a similarly configured PowerEdge. What is

It's awesome that you can get servers like that for those prices these days. One of my customers recently purchased a similarly configured PowerEdge. What is high-end about the database is you are trying to get high-end performance. Having all the data in RAM is the "close to the hardware" part of getting that performance. Having multiple computers is the parallelism part of that performance. Having virutualization sticks a software layer between MySQL and the RAM, and if you have other VMs running on the hardware, then any performance numbers will be dependent on what the other VMs are doing. Of course, if you have all the NDB nodes running as VMs on the same machine, then that will never be as fast as one NDB node running native on that same machine. If you are using the virtualization environment as a way to partition customers, consider that MySQL already does this well. A web hosting shop can have a singkle MySQL server and give each customers a database or databases and a user / pass to access only their own stuff.