From Scott Drummand’s – vpivot.com

In case you don’t know Scott is a VMware employee – he focuses on performance and scalability – and taking on Citrix/Microsoft at the how-got-the-best-product game…

Anyway, Scott’s a good resource for information (in fact some of it quite technical, but written in an accessible way) on performance.

Performance of Thin Provisioned Disks

This article debunks the popularly held myth that thin provisioning = poor performance. It doesn’t, so long as the underlying storage and VMFS is configured correctly. Actually, the performance is comparable to the old thick format. Don’t about you – but I’d rather be thin, than thick any day.

Additionally, my pal and fellow blogger – Steve Beaver has some interesting (and some would say more guarded) thoughts on thin-provisioning.

http://www.thevirtualblackhole.com/vwire/some-thoughts-on-thin-provisioning

esxtop Analysis With esxplot

This one allows you to download a graphing tool that take the raw date from an esxtop -b output – and doesn’t suffer from the column and row limitations of conventional systems – such as Microsoft Excel