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I may have to deal with a VMware ESX server to run some SCO OpenServer
5.0.6 apps. I've been using VMware Workstation successfully up to now,
but haven't tried performance testing either under serious system
load. (I was using Workstation for compilation and software debugging,
not high-load operations.)

What kind of performance penalty does VMware inflict on OpenServer? Is
it less of a hit under ESX than under Workstation? Are the bottlenecks
CPU, or disk, or network IO, or what? I recognize that these will
differ for different VMware and OS setups, and would like to hear
other people's experience.

For example, I'm seeing noticeable SSH startup delays on virtualized
SCO OpenServer clients: I assume this is due to a shortage of
randomizatioin data for PRNG to synchronize the keys, but can't yet
swear to that, and it's not that big a problem for me anyway.

And what are people using for system backup in their virtual
environments? It's clearly got to be network based, since talking to a
local tape drive is begging for grief under virtualization, especially
if the drive has to be shared. And talkiing to clones of the
OpenServer file systems is infeasible with the RHEL 3 that is the
foundation for VMware ESX.

If it were me doing it from scratch, I'd recomend using an rsync based
backup to a local network server capable of NFS serving the files back
to the SCO server to ease file recovery, such as rsnapshot, but are
there commercial tools that are known to work well? What do other
people use?