There's a lot of different places the choke point could be.
Not enough information to make a good guess, but a shot in the dark might be your spindles are doing too much work. Especially if those VMs are desktops for a VDI implementation (they tend to thrash storage). If it's the spindles, you...
You can do passthrough with the free version of ESXi (as long as your processor/motherboard supports it). The limit for vSphere 4 hypervisor (ESXi 5.x) is that you're limited to 32 GB of physical RAM. Free ESXi 4.x was limited to 256 GB. Go figure.
My recommendation (I'm a Cisco certified instructor):
Get your CCNA and VCP5 (it's a better test than the VCP4 anyway).
After that, VCAP5 (DCA or DCD). There's an excellent series of podcasts and webex's call vBrownBag for the pursuit of VCAP certs. Great way to study and learn from some...
Usually if you clone a VM the MAC will change as you can't have identical MACs on the same segment, VMware prevents this, and even if you were able to do it, this would cause a lot of weird problems.
That's why if you move a VM from one host to another by copying it, VMware will ask you if the...
I would recommend having an interest in both networking and virtualization. Both are hot careers right now, and you can make a great living off either. But if you know *both*, it will be highly, highly beneficial to you.
I know a guy who's a VCDX and a Cisco CCNP. He's highly sought after.
I noticed that adding up the cores gets 16, was there a particular reason for this?
You don't need to dedicate cores to VMs. Let's say you have a 4 core system. You can have more than 4 VMs. I could, for example, have 10 VMs, each allocated 2 vCPUs. The encoding VM you have seems about the only...
Fast Ethernet is limited to 12.5 Megabytes/second, which is probably insufficient for a lot of HD video.
Gigabit Ethernet is limited to 125 Megabytes/second, which will work with most HD video (not RED generated RAW I don't think, but all regularly encoded 1080p content).
You can get a 4 or...
If you weren't already planning on it, throw in a 4 GB flash drive to boot from, and perhaps splurge for an SSD (decent 256 GB can be had for around ~$225 now), which will make high I/O VMs fly.
One issue to keep an eye out for is the trombone effect. If you move a VM from one datacenter to another, what's its outgoing default gateway? Still in the old data center? All traffic destined for the VM will traverse the DCI, and return traffic will go back out through the DCI.
Here's a...
Since most laptops/desktops use non-ECC memory, you'd think the risks we're talking about here would result in lots of data corruption, all day 'errday.
In reality, we rarely see anything of the sort. Most of the time, a memory problem (which are rare, and tend to be a really, really bad DIMM)...