Elasticsearch on a virtual machine do or dont?

[licensebypass]

Hello everybody, I've been assigned the task of evaluating a few unused machines in a corporate network for the sole purpose of finding a place to setup Elasticsearch for a medium to large Magento installation, after extended talks with our sys admin team they have adviced us to avoid setting up JVM and elastic on a virtual machine.

Thing is , I've discovered a vps with 24gb of ram and decided to run some benchmarks on it, the only problem I could see would be the need for a bigger swap partition for elastic to play with, other than that my benchmarks seemed not that bad, does anybody have any experience on running elastic on a virtual machine? Could we atleast do dev and staging on the virtual?

here are a few benchmarks from the 24gb ram vps

noaa - noaa - 10GBMetric,Task,Value,UnitCumulative indexing time of primary shards, - Pastebin.com

geopoints - geopoints -3gbMetric,Task,Value,UnitCumulative indexing time of primary shar - Pastebin.com

Appreciate all the input!

[DavidTurner]

Loads of people run their production workloads in virtual machines with no problems. Elasticsearch doesn't really care whether it's on bare metal or not, and most modern VM implementations have minimal performance impact. If you are getting satisfactory performance then go for it.

@licensebypass

the only problem I could see would be the need for a bigger swap partition for elastic to play with,

The manual strongly recommends that you disable swap entirely. The usual arguments for the benefits of swap don't really apply to Elasticsearch.