Moritz Both's questions

In a virtual environment using VMware, I want to setup a Windows license server. Unfortunately, the vendor's license server refuses to run on a VM; it must be installed on a physical machine.

Since we have no physical Windows servers and don't want to have them: is it possible to set up a virtual environment which is mostly undetected by applications? How do applications detect that they are running on a virtual box?

I want to emphasize that we are not attempting to circumvent licensing requirements. This is just about avoiding cost for maintenance and energy for another mostly useless single point of failure.

The configuration is: A linux server and a nas box (netgear) acting as nfs server.

It is easy for a single process on the linux server to use all i/o bandwidth by simply copying a file from the nfs share to the nfs share. The i/o channel is jammed and all other processes on the server will nearly halt waiting for i/o. Load grows up to 10-20 (four cores), more and more pdflush processes appear... until someone stopps the file copy.

How can I limit the i/o bandwidth the cp process uses? nice will not help of course, but also ionice -c3 has no effect. Does ionice affect nfs mounts at all? Is there something like nfsnice ?

We are using VMware server 2 on linux debian at the moment. We may move to ESXi for better performance, but we use authentication for console access using our ldap directory (via PAM).

Can you do this with ESX/ESXi, too?