> Arguably where VMWare shines is management tools and so on, not exactly performance - this is kind of widely known, anecdotally at least and probably the number one reason they forbid benchmarks in the EULA.

Or maybe because people would publish "benchmarks" like this where they are comparing storage performance of a third party NFS solution (FreeNAS) running as a VMware VM and compare that to a solution using local disks and claim that is a useful comparison…