EXPERT RESPONSE
There is a VMware whitepaper from Dell that talks about performance of Exchange as a virtual machine as compared to a physical server. This will get you pretty close to what you are looking for from a performance perspective, but as to what is high I/O? It's a relative term to me.
When looking at a disk some folks may think a server with 100 or 200 I/O per second is high. Talk to an EMC rep about DMX storage and they laugh at 200 I/O per second for an individual server. Then again, if you are running an MSA 500 as the backend for a virtual machine platform several 200 I/O per second virtual machines will start to show a performance hit. Again it's still relative, the hypervisor is only going to show limited overhead, but the hardware underneath has to handle it.
As to a comparison between the platforms, I am not aware of any outside bodies doing independent testing of the hypervisors, but there is a constant battle between the companies about who performs better, each with their own numbers. I'd say your best bet is to get a trial of any you are looking at, and pound it yourself.
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