Now that vSphere actually has the official option to virtualize ESXi hosts, I actually tried it out using a cluster of 3 blade servers. Unfortunately it comes out to be really slow when running my nested VMs. Starting up the Windows installation on a VM takes quite a long time (20+ minutes). Even connecting to my hosts via the vSphere client takes awhile (2 - 3 minutes).
Each of my virtual hosts have 2 cores with 8GB of ram. 1 NIC attached. I only created two hosts running on ESXi5.
Does everybody get the same performance issues or am I missing some tweak?