Although VMware provides tools to help manage application performance, they can't replace the human touch. Dedicate time to assess performance profiles before a migration to ESX Server, ensuring users see comparable performance after the migration. Look not only at how many available resources a given application requires, but also at peak performance profiles.
A natural pairing may be putting a VM running an e-mail server and one running file and print services on the same box. But if a significant number of users bring mail offline at the end of the day, print large documents to read during the commute home and use offline folders as simple backup, those VMs could slow substantially at the end of the day as they compete for resources.
The Virtual Infrastructure Client used to manage VM images has a set of tools for monitoring VM performance; the one thing missing is the ability to adaptively set resources based on demand thresholds. That way, if the CPU utilization of a given VM exceeds a certain level, the ESX Server could allocate more resource from less critical VMs automatically.
One challenge you'll face with VMs is managing the changing demands users put on a given application. Some apps will become more important and experience increased load over time, while others lose importance and see load decrease. This plays into one of VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3's strengths: the ability to migrate VMs to different hardware as requirements change.
If one VM is impacting the performance of another, we found that you can, with relative ease, migrate the VM to another server. Third-party tools, such as those from Altiris, also make it easy to create images of VMs to simplify adding more computing resources as necessary.
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