Yes, there will most likely be impact to performance as is inherent to VMs, however there is no perfect answer to whether this will be noticeable or negligible.
It really is based on the amount of jobs (upload, download, search, etc), users connecting, any other service connections, and future usage. Also where the server farm is located in relation to the user base.
Our current version is 8.0.3 with over 500k assets. We opted for 3 beefy physical job servers when we upgraded from 4.6 to 7 with 250k assets due to our future goals of MB with VideoLogger. Now, we are also at a point we would like to revisit using VMs and add more servers to help off-set the performance degradation from physical servers.
Usually VMWare is not recommended for Production environment as there will be a performance issue because of virtualization. If you have the requirement to run on VM, make sure VMWare tools is installed.
vmware tools are installed in our servers. hence we can use virtual servers for production i believe?
You shouldn't have any problems virtualizing your Asset Servers with VMWare ESX. However, it is a good idea to have your database and probably IDOL located on physical machines with appropriate RAID configuration based on your needs. You might check with IDOL support team for their recommendations regarding virtualization of IDOL.
